For the first time ever, the Epigram Books Fiction Prize competition awarded not one, but two winners. Local authors Meihan Boey and Sebastian Sim received top honours at the January 16 virtual award ceremony, for their manuscripts The Formidable Miss Cassidy and And The Award Goes to Sally Bong respectively. It's bagged them $15,000 each and the chance to publish their novels under Epigram Books.
It's a first time win for Meihan Boey. But she's not new to the scene, having most recently published the science fiction novella The Messiah Virus, set in a colonised universe run by an operating system known as The Empress. Now that her latest novel has come out on top at the Epigram Books Fiction Award, we catch up with her about her award-winning novel and find out about her geeky interests and pursuits.
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Over the phone, Meihan Boey speaks quickly, crisply, and always with a touch of humour. It’s been a mere few days since the announcement of her joint win of the Epigram Books Fiction Prize on January 16, and the excitement, if faded, is still palpable. When asked how she’s feeling, Meihan admits to a touch of disbelief.
“I was quite surprised to be honest, because I originally submitted the manuscript, kind of just for fun, because I thought it sounded like quite a fun story,” she shares.
“It really is a very light-hearted story. I didn’t really expect it to get that far.”
Indeed, Meihan’s road to winning the prize has been peppered with doses of fun and “why-nots”. The prize-winning manuscript is, if you will, something of a circuit break baby. For lack of anything to do during Singapore’s lockdown, Meihan found online communities of writers who entertained themselves by writing light-hearted short stories.
“I found these internal publications here and there around the world with people going, well, we are all writers, we got nothing to do, let’s come up with shit,” Meihan says with a laugh. It was at the urging of various people along the way that Meihan thought “why not?” and turned her short story into a full-length novel, eventually submitting it to the Epigram Books Fiction Prize.
The Formidable Miss Cassidy itself sounds like a rollicking good ride. Meihan describes it as a horror-comedy-romance, about a governess who arrives to work for a British family. When it turns out that the family is haunted by a pontianak, Miss Cassidy’s mysterious gifts and abilities start to show themselves, leading to a whole load of hijinks.
“It gets a little more hantu, and you get a bit of romance too,” says Meihan.
For the love of comics
To understand the surprising mix of genres in her latest manuscript, it helps to take a look back at Meihan’s career and influences.
She started out as a professional bookseller at Kinokuniya and Prologue, heading up Kinokuniya’s comic book section for seven years. Currently the vice president of the Association of Comic Artists of Singapore, Meihan herself has contributed to graphic novel scripts such as The Once and Marvellous DKD, about Singaporean musicians in the Vietnam War.
She’s also a self-professed geek. “When I was young – and we’re talking about the 80s or 90s here – I read a lot of comic books, played a lot of Dungeon and Dragons, read a lot of fantasy and that kind of thing,” says Meihan.
It was the DC comic imprint Vertigo that triggered her lifelong love of graphic novels. A huge Neil Gaiman fan as well, Meihan was taken with the world of gods and legends – forgotten, but immortal, roaming the Earth. Taken together, these influences have culminated in fantastical works like her 2019 space opera The Messiah Virus, and the latest The Formidable Miss Cassidy.
The Southeast Asian influence in her novels is something we love to see, and Meihan says that the inclusion is very deliberate. Nowadays, we have the likes of the Tensorate Series by J.Y. Yang, that unabashedly draws from Southeast Asian culture and legends. But things were different when Meihan was growing up.
“Especially in the 80s, there was really very little Asian representation, and pretty much no Southeast Asian representation. Even now if you tried to look, even though everybody's trying to be a bit more woke and everything, there really isn't a lot of acknowledgement that this area of the world exists,” says Meihan.
“We have a very rich and vibrant culture and history that is distinct from being Japanese or Korean or Chinese. There is a very strong idea of what someone in Thailand is like versus what someone in Malaysia is like.”
For the love of fun
Things never get too serious with Meihan though. Her writing is strongly driven by her desire for one thing – fun.
Meihan devoured SingLit when she was young, loving books by Catherine Lim and Suchen Christine Lim for example. But looking back, she can’t help but observe how serious it all was. “Partly because [SingLit] was just starting out, a lot of it was about sharing historical experiences or cultural experiences. So, they are serious books with serious points to make.”
While Meihan doesn’t discount the quality and importance of early SingLit works, she craved something simpler. “We didn’t have a great deal of books which you just pick up for fun. In the UK, you would just, you know, go to a bookshelf, and randomly pick one and go, oh, this looks like a good detective story. It's probably not believable, but it doesn't matter, because you're going to read it on the train or read it on your holiday. We don't really have that much. So, that was kind of where I was trying to go.”
“I just wanted to write something I would read.”
When asked what she thinks drew the judges to The Formidable Miss Cassidy though, Meihan credits the eclectic judging panel this year, as well as the character of Miss Cassidy herself. “I don't know for sure. I would think maybe it was Miss Cassidy herself who was interesting…I’m hoping that the characters are what caught [the judges’] attention.”
“You think of Jane Eyre, someone who is rootless. She doesn't have a family, so she could be anyone and from anywhere, and that is very similar to how I created Miss Cassidy.”
As the fact of her win sinks in, Meihan will be working on publishing the final version of The Formidable Miss Cassidy with editors at Epigram Books. True to her geek heart, she also hopes to put up a comic book this year, all while collaborating on a homebrew version of Dungeons and Dragons. It’ll be very specifically Southeast Asian, where players get to play Sang Nila Utama or other regional heroes.
In the meantime, she hopes readers pick up The Formidable Miss Cassidy when it’s published later in 2021, and most importantly, that we have a swell time while reading it.
