Amanda Chong

A lawyer trained in Cambridge and Harvard, Amanda Chong is also a poet and playwright who explores themes of gender and power in her work. Her plays include the sold-out one woman show Psychobitch (Wild Rice, 2023), the musical The Feelings Farm (Esplanade, 2021 and 2024), and the award-winning play, #WomenSupportingWomen (T:>Works, 2022), which was also staged in Cambridge, UK. Her first poetry collection, Professions (2016), was shortlisted for the 2018 Singapore Literature Prize, and her poetry has been engraved on the Marina Bay Helix Bridge and included in the Cambridge International GCSE Syllabus.

In her legal career, Chong was the top candidate at the Singapore Bar in 2013. She specialises in public international law, and also served on the United Nations Expert Group on Trafficking in Persons in 2016. She regularly speaks on public policy and social justice issues in national forums and abroad.

She also co-founded ReadAble in 2014, a non‑profit organisation that aims to improve social mobility through English literacy classes for children and migrant women in low-income communities. For her exceptional voluntary service to improving literacy, Chong was conferred the Commonwealth Points of Light award in 2022 by Queen Elizabeth II. She was appointed to the Panel of Advisers to the Youth Court by the President of Singapore in 2020, received the Singapore Youth Award—the nation’s highest accolade for youths—in 2018, and the President’s Scholarship in 2008.