LAWYER, POET,
PLAYWRIGHT, ADVOCATE
__________
about
Amanda Chong is a lawyer trained in Cambridge and Harvard, who writes when she should be sleeping. Her poetry has been engraved on the Marina Bay Helix Bridge and included in the Cambridge International GCSE Syllabus.
Her first collection of poems, Professions (2016), was shortlisted for the 2018 Singapore Literature Prize. Her plays include the one woman show Psychobitch (Wild Rice, 2023), which played to sold out audiences in an extended run; the musical The Feelings Farm (Esplanade, 2021, 2024); and the award-winning #WomenSupportingWomen (T:>Works, 2022). Her work has been staged in Cambridge, UK and at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
Amanda is interested in exploring themes of gender and power in her writing. Her academic writing has been published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Gender, while her creative work has appeared in avenues such as Monocle, The Straits Times and Quarterly Literary Review Singapore.
In her legal career, Amanda was the top candidate at the Singapore Bar in 2013 and served as an expert at the United Nations Expert Group on the International Legal Definition of Trafficking in Persons in 2016. She regularly speaks on public policy and social justice issues in national forums and abroad. In 2017, she presented the CNA documentary Law of the Land on the social impact of laws in Singapore society from crown colony to sovereign republic, including the abolition of servitude and the enshrining of women's rights.
Amanda also co-founded ReadAble, a non-profit organisation that runs weekly English literacy classes for children and migrant women in a low-income neighbourhood since 2014, with the aim of improving social mobility. She was founding web editor of poetry.sg, the first online database of Singapore poetry, complete with critical analyses and a multimedia archive.
Amanda was awarded the President’s Scholarship in 2008; the Singapore Youth Award in 2018, the nation’s highest accolade for youths; and was named Her World's Young Woman Achiever in 2022 and to the Generation T List of young leaders shaping Asia’s future in 2019. She was appointed to the Panel of Advisers to the Youth Court by the President of Singapore in 2020, and received the Commonwealth Points of Light Award in 2022 from Her Majesty The Queen Elizabeth II.