Jemimah Wei was born and raised in Singapore, and is currently a 2022-2024 Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She is the recipient of fellowships, scholarships and awards from Columbia University, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Singapore’s National Arts Council and more. Her fiction has won the William Van Dyke Short Story Prize, been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and has been published in Guernica, Narrative and Nimrod, among other publications. She was recently named one of Narrative’s “30 below 30” writers, recognized by the Best of the Net Anthologies, and is a Francine Ringold Award for New Writers honoree. For close to a decade, prior to moving to the US to earn an MFA at Columbia University where she was a Felipe P. De Alba Fellow, she worked as a host for various broadcast and digital channels, and has written and produced short films and travel guides for brands like Laneige, Airbnb and Nikon.

Books by Jemimah Wei

The Original Daughter

by Jemimah Wei - Fiction, Women's Fiction

Before Arin, Genevieve Yang was an only child. Living with her parents and grandmother in a single-room flat in working-class Bedok, Genevieve is saddled with an unexpected sibling when Arin appears, the shameful legacy of a grandfather long believed to be dead. As the two girls grow closer, they must navigate the intensity of life in a place where the urgent insistence on achievement demands constant sacrifice. Knowing that failure is not an option, the sisters learn to depend entirely on one another as they spurn outside friendships, leisure and any semblance of a social life in pursuit of academic perfection and passage to a better future. When a stinging betrayal violently estranges Genevieve and Arin, Genevieve must weigh the value of ambition versus familial love, home versus the outside world, and allegiance to herself versus allegiance to the people who made her who she is.