Jayanthi Sankar
Jayanthi Sankar has lived in Singapore since 1990, yet her work keeps one foot in South Asia and the other in the wider world. Born in Madurai, she spent her early years moving across Indian states because of her father’s central government posting. That childhood, shaped by frequent moves, left her with an ear for language and a habit of watching how people adapt. After her marriage, she settled in Singapore, where public libraries became her daily refuge. Long hours of reading did more than pass time. They trained her eye and built a strict inner critic that would later push her toward writing.
From Reader to Writer, Without a Classroom
In the mid-1990s, that inner critic began to interrupt her reading. Instead of quieting it, she tried a short story. The piece, titled Turning Point, found a place in print, and the result surprised her. The experiment did not stop there. More stories followed, and a long stretch of self-taught writing began. She did not come through a workshop circuit or a formal program. The work grew through reading, revision, and a steady habit of returning to the page. Over time, themes began to form before the first line was written, and those themes guided tone and structure. She has said that fiction lets her live many lives, step into other minds, and test how people think under pressure.
What Her Fiction Tries to Do
Across her books, Sankar returns to questions of ethnicity, migration, history, and the pull of place. Singapore, with its layered cultures, appears often, not as a postcard city but as a living space with tension and memory. Her stories use direct language, yet they leave room for readers to draw their own meaning. Characters sit at the center. They carry doubt, memory, and private conflict. The result is work that stays away from easy answers and keeps a measured distance from the author’s own voice. This approach has helped her stand out in a field that often leans toward clear moral lines.
A Career That Runs Beside Writing
Outside books, Sankar works full time as an onsite interpreter at Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower. She covers English, Tamil, Hindi, and Malayalam, a role that puts her in daily contact with workers and officials from many backgrounds. The job demands precision and calm. It also places her in rooms where real stakes exist, from labor disputes to legal checks. That exposure does not turn into direct plot points, yet it feeds her sense of how language shapes power and how small shifts in words can change outcomes.
Recognition on the Festival and Award Circuit
Over the years, Sankar has appeared on panels at several literary events, including the Singapore Writers Festival, the ASEAN–India Pravasi Bharatiya Divas Writers Festival, and the Asia-Pacific Writers and Translators gathering in Gold Coast in 2018. Her books have also traveled through award lists in different countries. Tabula Rasa reached the longlist of the 2025 Chommanard Women’s Literary Award and drew notice at the 2022 NYC Big Book Award in the historical fiction category, along with an honourable mention at the San Francisco Book Festival the same year. Misplaced Heads made the final list of the 2020 Eyelands Book Awards in Greece, where it was noted for its postmodern take on history. Her short story collection Dangling Gandhi won the 2020 International Book Award from the American Book Fest and later received the Literary Titan Award. More recently, the novella When Will You Die? turned inward to study the human mind and the quiet fears that shape daily choice.
Why She Left Newsrooms Behind
Before her books found readers, Sankar spent three years in journalism. The work taught her discipline and speed, yet the strict frames of news writing left little space for her kind of questions. Deadlines and fixed forms did not suit a writer who preferred to test structure and voice. She has spoken of that period as useful but tight. Once she stepped away, she returned to fiction with a sense of relief and a clearer idea of what she did not want to do.
A Turn Toward Visual Art
The same inner critic that led her to writing also pushed her toward painting. In January 2017, she began with a pencil. Within months, she moved through charcoal, colored pencils, and pastels before settling into watercolour. The pace was steady. In less than two years, she produced more than 250 works that ranged from landscapes and heritage sites to birds, flowers, and city forms. She also tried acrylics for abstract work with a palette knife. In September 2018, she held a one-day solo exhibition with support from Singapore’s National Library Board. For her, painting remains a quiet practice, one that does not compete with writing but sits beside it.
How She Approaches the Page
Sankar’s process places heavy weight on revision. Drafts go through strict checks, and she does not rush a piece into print. She prefers to leave space in the text, a gap where readers can bring their own sense of meaning. This method explains why some of her stories feel spare on the surface yet carry long echoes. The work avoids neat closure. Instead, it aims to reflect how people think and remember, with all the loose ends that remain in real life.
Creating Room for New Voices
Beyond her own books, Sankar has spent more than a decade helping to build platforms for new writers. That effort now takes shape in the 2026 International Short Story Contest, launched through the Jay Yes Foundation. The theme, “Seeking Refuge: Stories of Displacement,” points to a subject that sits close to current global debates. The contest is open worldwide and does not charge an entry fee, a choice meant to keep the door open to writers who lack access to paid routes. A panel of international judges will review the selected work for a possible anthology. Zero Degree Publishing has also said it will look at publication options and podcast features for winners.
A Body of Work Still in Motion Three decades after she moved to Singapore, Jayanthi Sankar’s career shows no sign of settling into a single lane. She continues her work as an interpreter, paints when time allows, and writes fiction that tests how people carry memory and place. Awards and festival lists mark the public side of that work. The private side remains the same habit she built in library aisles years ago: read, question, return to the page, and revise until the story says what it needs to say. In a literary scene that often favors speed and noise, her approach stays measured, and that restraint may be what keeps readers
About the Author
