Jemimah Wei

After a three-year career in advertising as a copywriter and eight years as an onscreen presenter and host, Jemimah shifted much of her focus to literary projects in 2017. In 2017, she launched the unprecedented #JemmaRecommends reading project with Times Books and WH Smith, promoting a range of curated titles in-store that focused on identity and migration, and in 2018, Jemimah established a scholarship with GrabAcademy supporting one student interested in pursuing a tertiary education in the arts and humanities. That same year, she became an ambassador for the Word on Wheels non-profit volunteer cooperation.

In 2022, she was one of Twitter’s featured personalities for their #SheInspiresMe International Women’s Day campaign, which highlights inspirational women across Southeast Asia who have been breaking the bias and stereotypes that exist around women, and in January 2025, she was featured in PORTER’s Incredible Women series. With the release of her book, she was named a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 and the NYT Editors Pick.

She is a 2022-24 Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, a 2020 Felipe P. De Alba Fellow at Columbia University, and a Francine Ringold Award for New Writers honouree. Her fiction has won the William Van Dyke Short Story Prize and has been published in Narrative, Guernica, and Joyland, amongst others. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, recognized by the Best of the Net anthologies, and received scholarships from Singapore’s National Arts Council, Bread Load Writers Conference, Sewanee Writers Conference, and Columbia University, where she earned her MFA. She is currently a Senior Prose Editor at The Massachusetts Review.