Interview Novelist Thailand / Singapore

Thammika Songkaeo on Womanhood, Displacement, and Writing Across Borders

Thammika Songkaeo is a transnational novelist, non-fiction writer, and film producer of Thai origin whose work is shaped by a life lived across continents—including India, Uganda, Rwanda, the United States, and Singapore.

Her rich cross-cultural experiences converge in Stamford Hospital, her debut novel, which emerged following her nomination to the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference. She attended the conference on a Katharine Bakeless Nason Scholarship, and has also been awarded a fellowship to the Comparative Literature PhD program at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as a grant from the Smithsonian's Freer|Sackler Galleries.

A literary scholar by training, Thammika graduated with Highest Honors in French Literature from Williams College and later earned an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Her global sensibilities, paired with an incisive lens on the intersections of womanhood and society, earned her a National Geographic Society Storytelling grant in 2022—further expanding her commitment to telling stories that bridge personal experience and systemic truths.

Her creative work spans forms, with fiction, nonfiction, and performance writing published in Ninth Letter, World Literature Today online, and for the Singapore National Library Board. Among her works is a feature of monologues exploring gender and cultural identity through voice and silence.

Outside the page, Thammika is the co-founder of Two Glasses LLP, a company focused on designing social and environmental experiences that provoke shifts in how people perceive their identities and the planet's crises.

As the Producer of Changing Room—a dance film interrogating the relationship between body image and climate change—she leads a global circuit of experiential screenings that incorporate somatic movement and guided journaling.

Her academic contributions in the social sciences have been cited by institutions such as the Brookings Institution and The Journal of Southeast Asian Human Rights. Yet despite her expansive work across disciplines and media, Thammika identifies, first and last, as a writer—one whose work insists on asking difficult questions across borders, bodies, and belief systems.

Your debut novel, Stamford Hospital, explores motherhood, identity, and isolation within the context of Singapore's high-achieving expatriate class. What inspired the psychological framing of this story, especially Tarisa's decision to hospitalize her daughter despite her being barely ill?

Thammika:

I was interested in the ways women under extreme stress—that isn't articulated—journey through emotional breakdowns. In expat environments—especially polished, high-functioning ones like Singapore's—it's easy for breakdowns to slip through the crack unidentified because materials create the illusion that one has everything, including happiness. Tarisa's decision to hospitalize her daughter is irrational, but emotionally justified. That, to me, is the more interesting way harm manifests: out of motherhood, a loss of professional identity, and loneliness, we can—and will—do things beyond reason, and they feel so good. That's what I wanted to write into.

Much of your work traverses borders geographical, cultural, and emotional. How have your lived experiences across countries like Uganda, India, and the U.S. informed the emotional interiority of characters like Tarisa?

Thammika:

Each place I've lived has shown me how fragile, and often characterized by others, our own identity is. It takes almost nothing—a change in accent, visa status, or even climate—for a person to feel foreign to themselves and to identified as a thing by others, which may not be true to the person themselves. That's the inner world Tarisa lives in: she has her own world, and she has the worlds of others she responds to. That kind of displacement isn't just about logistics; it seeps into how we parent, how we partner, and even how we collapse.

The themes of womanhood and societal constraint echo throughout both your fiction and nonfiction. In Stamford Hospital, how did you navigate the tension between a woman's intellect and the invisibility that can come with domestic motherhood?

Thammika:

That tension is the marrow of the book. Tarisa is intelligent, but there's no room to display that intelligence in her day-to-day life—at least not in a way that satisfies her. So she uses intellect in distorted ways: to monitor, to diagnose, to rationalize. The more invisible she feels, the more "untethered"—to borrow the words of many readers—her thinking becomes. I wanted to show what happens when a brilliant mind has no appropriate outlet—and begins to collapse inward.

Your novel is set over just two nights, creating a compressed, almost claustrophobic timeline. What were you hoping to achieve by placing Tarisa's unraveling in such a concentrated timeframe?

Thammika:

I wanted the reader to feel how rich her mind was, how much could happen in it. I wanted to write her mind and also show how time feels in a mind. If this woman were real and you encountered her, you'd get to know only an iota of what she lets out. By creating so much of her mind in a short period of time, I share with readers what a mind is capable of—and thus remind them, I think, of how much a person is in their own heads.

As a producer of Changing Room and as someone who writes across genres, how do you decide which form is the right container for a story?

Thammika:

It comes down to who I what I already know: I make films when I know what I want to create, what the end goal is. I write when I don't know what I want to create, what the end goal is. Film—of which I've made just Changing Room, by the way—is my way to announce, not explore. Writing is my way to explore myself, and along the way, if I make anything interesting for others, that's extra.

You've received support from institutions like National Geographic and the Smithsonian. How has engaging with storytelling from a research or academic lens shaped your creative processes?

Thammika:

I didn't get my PhD in Comparative Literature. In fact, I quit the program. What I did get was a Graduate Fellowship to attend the PhD program at The University of Texas at Austin.

Being trained to do research and to be an academic and getting support from the institutions you mentioned make my creative process more meta: I write, and a nanosecond later, I study what I write, and then I edit and write, and then I study it. There are levels of analysis simultaneously occurring as I create.

In Stamford Hospital, Singapore itself almost acts like a character. What are you saying about place and belonging in expatriate life?

Thammika:

Singapore's quietness is calming, but it's also what allows for so much disconnect at times. As Tarisa's loneliness runs deep, we understand how what Singapore is doesn't help: expatriate life—just that term alone—seems to mean that that someone has arrived, or has a certain status, things, and forms to achieve happiness. But for women who have lost the most important aspects of themselves and are lumped under there, how can this be?

You've described your work at Two Glasses LLP as designing experiences that transform how people think and feel. How does that mission echo through your fiction?

Thammika:

Two Glasses LLP is a separate professional identity, and I wouldn't want the two of them mixed up.

What do you think fiction can do—particularly transnational fiction—that social science or journalism can't?

Thammika:

Fiction personalizes and asks readers to connect with characters not fleetingly.

With Stamford Hospital being your first novel, what does success look like for you?

Thammika:

Whenever I do book tours and talks, I move this book outside of the literary sphere and into the social sphere. Everything that happens to Tarisa, the protagonist, is spoken of in terms of how it also happens to women in real life, and the audience often erupts in discussion.

The book has already been discussed in Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and Dubai, to name a few places, and it's really only the beginning. What happens in Stamford Hospital happens to women worldwide. There are elements of womanhood in this book, whether in motherhood, or in being a partner, or in losing a professional identity, for instance, that all women will find their home and entry to it.

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