Jesse Sutanto has won the Comedy women in print prize, the UK’s only award for humorous writing by women, for her “deliciously frantic comedy caper” Dial A for Aunties.
A blend of mystery and romantic comedy, Sutanto’s debut novel for adults follows the misadventures of Meddy Chan, who turns to her meddling aunties for help when she accidentally kills her blind date. Chair of judges Joanne Harris, the author of Chocolat, said it was packed with: “absurd situations, hilarious dialogue, wonderful family dynamics and crackling with comic energy”.
Sutanto, who grew up shuttling between Indonesia and Singapore and currently lives in Jakarta, said it was “unreal” to win the £3,000 award, which was set up in 2019 by the comedian and writer Helen Lederer in response to the paucity of female winners of the Wodehouse prize for comic fiction.
“I feel like a lot of women are raised to be very humble, and when people give us compliments, we’re supposed to be like, ‘Oh, no, it’s not that big a deal’,” said Sutanto. “Yesterday, my husband said to our five-year-old, ‘Mama did an amazing thing, she is certified the funniest female author in an entire country’. And my five-year-old was like, wow, and I said ‘Oh, no, Papa is just exaggerating’. He said, ‘I’m literally not’, and then it hit me and I had to have a moment because that’s just too big. I needed to have a moment to let it sink in.”
Sutanto, who did a master’s in creative writing at Oxford, has previously written children’s and young adult novels. She initially considered writing Dial A for Aunties as a YA title, but felt it would be “really disturbing to be moving a teenage boy’s body around”.
It was her husband, who is English, who suggested she write about her family because “they’re just so out there”. “But every time I tried, the drama hit too close to home, and I wasn’t having fun writing it, I was getting stressed out. So I thought, well, what if I leaned into making it really, really ridiculous, and just threw in a dead body and saw what happened,” she said. “It turned out that was the ingredient that I was missing.” Dial A for Aunties is set in California, around a family of Chinese-Indonesian wedding planners.
Sutanto started out writing dark suspense, and says her friends would tell her that her characters were “too flippant about murder”. “The Aunties can be very flippant, as long as I have the main character as the normal person who is going out of her mind. So the comedy actually came very, very naturally, which was really great,” she said. After a bidding war, the novel is being adapted by Netflix, which describes it as Crazy Rich Asians meets Weekend at Bernie’s.
Dial A for Aunties beat titles including Dolly Alderton’s debut novel Ghosts to the prize, for which Alderton was named runner-up. “Ghosts is a marvellously accomplished, tender, witty and human story that should speak to women everywhere,” said Harris.
The winners were announced at a ceremony at the Groucho Club in London on Monday evening, where the unpublished comic novel prize went to Jobcentre worker and single mum Rebecca Rogers for The Purgatory Poisoning. Judges said the novel seemed “to be inspired by a childhood diet of Blackadder and Monty Python”. Rogers wins a publishing contract and a £5,000 advance from HarperFiction.
