A message for New Naratif’s community:

1. Thank you Kirsten!

Kirsten Han has decided to step down from her role as Editor-in-Chief of New Naratif. As one of our founders, Kirsten was fundamental in the creation of this organisation and instrumental in building our movement from the ground up. New Naratif’s team, the Board, and I are all incredibly grateful to her for her work and leadership in establishing New Naratif as a platform to enable Southeast Asians to tell their own stories in their own languages. Her hard work and vision has enabled stories to come to light which would otherwise never have been told.

I want to thank Kirsten for her immense courage and all of her many contributions to New Naratif. We wish her nothing but the very best in all her future endeavours. We look forward to more stories from her in New Naratif, and will always cheer her on in her quest to tell important stories about Singapore. We may no longer be colleagues, but we will always be comrades in the fight for justice, democracy, and freedom in Southeast Asia.

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We are independent, ad-free and pro-democracy. Our operations are member-funded. Membership starts from just US$5/month! Alternatively, write to sponsorship@newnaratif.com to request a free sponsored membership. As a member, you are supporting fair payment of freelancers, and a movement for democracy and transnational community building in Southeast Asia.

Thum Ping Tjin (“PJ”) is Managing Director of New Naratif and founding director of Project Southeast Asia, an interdisciplinary research centre on Southeast Asia at the University of Oxford. A Rhodes Scholar, Commonwealth Scholar, Olympic athlete, and the only Singaporean to swim the English Channel, his work centres on Southeast Asian governance and politics. His most recent work is Living with Myths in Singapore (Ethos: 2017, co-edited with Loh Kah Seng and Jack Chia). He is creator of “The History of Singapore” podcast, available on iTunes. Reach him at pingtjin.thum@newnaratif.com.