Mandy-Suzanne Wong
Bermudian Mandy-Suzanne Wong’s acclaimed debut novel, Drafts of a Suicide Note (Regal House, 2019), was a finalist for American Book Fest’s Best Book Award for General Fiction, the Eyelands International Book Award, and the Permafrost Book Prize, as well as a Conium Review Book Prize semfinalist, a Santa Fe Writers’ Project Literary Award shortlistee, and a PEN Open Book Award nominee. She is also the author of the fiction chapbook Awabi (Digging Press, 2019), winner of the Digging Press Chapbook Series Award, and the nonfiction chapbook Artificial Wilderness, winner of the Selcouth Station Environmental Chapbook Competition (Selcouth Station Press, forthcoming). Her nonfiction manuscript Listen, we all bleed was named a finalist and awarded an honorable mention in the Red Hen Press Women’s Prose Prize Competition, and her story “Coconut Octopus” took first prize in the Eyelands International Flash Fiction Competition. In addition to her regular column at Manqué Magazine, she has published in Entropy, Waccamaw, The Spectacle, The Island Review, Quail Bell, The Deck Hand, and several other venues.
Works

Drafts of a Suicide Note
Regal House Publishing, October 2019.
“As far as I know, you can only die once…” But when Aetna Simmons disappears from her lonely Bermuda cottage, she leaves behind not one but ten suicide notes. Ten different suicide notes. And no other trace to speak of, not even a corpse, as if she’d never existed.
Drafts of a Suicide Note is the darkly enigmatic love letter of Kenji Okada-Caines, a petty criminal who once exposited on English literary classics and now, marooned on his native isle, nurtures an obsession with Aetna’s writing. His murky images of a woman with ten voices and no face launch him into waking nightmares, driving him to confront his lifetime’s worth of failures as a scholar, lover, and opiate addict. His wild conspiracy theories of Aetna as an impostor ten times over lead him to the doorstep of the Japanese mother who turned her back on him, and to the horrifying discovery that the great love of his life isn’t who she seems to be. Kenji’s is a story of dire misunderstandings and the truths we hide even from the ones we love.
Listen, we all bleed
Animals Across Discipline, Time & Space
Artificial Wilderness
Awabi
Awards and Recognition
- Finalist, Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award, 2019 - Drafts of a Suicide Note
- Finalist (Fiction: General), American Book Fest's Best Book Award, 2019 - Drafts of a Suicide Note
- Finalist, Eyelands Book Award, 2019 - Drafts of a Suicide Note
- Winner, Selcouth Station Press Environmental Chapbook Competition, 2019 - Artificial Wilderness
- Finalist and Honorable Mention, Red Hen Press Women's Prose Prize Competition, 2019 - Listen, we all bleed
- Winner, Digging Press Chapbook Series Competition, 2018 - Awabi
- Winner, Eyelands/Strange Days Books International Flash Fiction Contest, 2018 - "Coconut Octopus (Amphioctopus marginatus)"
- Finalist, Permafrost Book Prize, 2018 - Drafts of a Suicide Note
- Honorable Mention, Leapfrog Press Fiction Contest, 2017 - Drafts of a Suicide Note
- Semifinalist, Conium Review Book Prize, 2016 - Drafts of a Suicide Note
Press and Media Mentions
- Drafts of a Suicide Note, American Book Fest 2019 Best Book Award (Fiction: General) results listing, 2019.
- Drafts of a Suicide Note, Bernews, Bermuda, 2019.
- Listen, we all bleed, Phantom Power, USA, 2019.
- Drafts of a Suicide Note, Royal Gazette, Bermuda, 2018.
- Awabi, Bernews, Bermuda, 2019.
- Listen, we all bleed, Animal Sounds, UK, 2018.
- Coconut Octopus, Bernews, Bermuda, 2018