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Look inside the book
A novella shortlisted for the 2022 Singapore Literature Prize (Fiction in English)
Recipient of the 2022 Singapore Literature Prize Readers’ Favourite English Book
Snow falls over Singapore for exactly four minutes and twenty-six seconds, quietly interrupting the lives of a dozen individuals, lonely and adrift: an art student and a former fling, chancing upon one another at Punggol MRT station; two men awake at 4am, watching YouTube videos of hail falling over the island nation; a sugar baby trawling through Google Maps, exploring the homes and neighbourhoods of her former clients...
Witness the near-miraculous ways passers-by can transform the trajectories of one another’s lives.
Shantih Shantih Shantih is a heady mix of desire and dauntlessness that revels in its interconnections, pulling close a community that is at once together and apart.
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“Dreamscape, portrait and meditation, Shantih Shantih Shantih is a distinctly Singaporean book that echoes the loneliness of living in a global city—together yet apart, intimate yet distant, aspirational yet melancholic.”
—Quarterly Literary Review Singapore
“An elegiac meditation on our desire for both individuality and interconnection… A remarkable feat for a work of fiction from a promising writer who will continue to do great things.”
—Balli Kaur Jaswal, Shirley Geok-lin Lim & Xu Xi, 2022 Singapore Literature Prize judges’ citation
“There is just no other local author who writes with Daryl’s emo-Piscean sense of awe and wonder, making him as queerly unique as a pirouetting flake of starry snow.”
—Cyril Wong
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Daryl Qilin Yam is a writer and editor of prose and poetry. His first novel, Kappa Quartet (2016), was longlisted for the Epigram Books Fiction Prize and was released by Epigram Books in Singapore and the UK; it was selected by The Business Times as one of the best novels of 2016. His second novel, Lovelier, Lonelier (2021), was a finalist for the 2021 Epigram Books Fiction Prize and nominated by the National Library Board for the 2023 International Dublin Literary Award. His writing has also appeared in periodicals and publications such as Berlin Quarterly and the Best New Singaporean Short Stories anthology series.
