SINGAPORE — After last year’s successful first edition, the Migrant Worker Poetry Competition is back, and it has expanded its call for entries to other nationalities and languages.

Organised by Singapore-based independent Bengali newspaper Banglar Kantha (Voice of Bengal) and a group of volunteers, the inaugural edition last year featured participants who wrote poems in Bengali and Tamil. This year, it is including poems written in Bahasa Indonesia, Burmese, Mandarin, Tagalog and Thai.

Organisations such as Aidha, HOME and Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2) have stepped in to help spread the word regarding a project that aims to celebrate the literary talents of migrant workers in Singapore. The final round of the competition will be held on Dec 13 at the National Library.

“Last year, we received an overwhelmingly positive response from the Singaporean community. This year we hope to discover voices from a wider set of nationalities (including) those from China, Indonesia, Myanmar and the Philippines, to name a few,” said Shivaji Das, a writer and one of the competition’s organisers.

“We also wanted to hear more female voices, who often happen to be domestic workers from Indonesia or the Philippines,” he added. “We will also showcase, over video, migrant worker poets working in Malaysia, Kuwait and China to make this an international cultural platform.”

Among the judges will be Singapore poets Alvin Pang and Kirpal Singh, who were also members of last year’s jury. There are also plans to publish an anthology of the poems from the final round of the competition.

The inaugural competition had created a buzz, with the shortlisted poems published on the contest’s website, http://www.singaporeworkerpoetry.com. The contest had also inspired a contemporary dance piece created by dance company CHOWK titled From Another Land. It featured two of the winners, construction supervisor and freelance journalist Zakir Hussain Khokon and shipyard worker Rajib Shil Jibon, reading their pieces onstage. This year’s Singapore Writers Festival will also be including a panel discussion on migrant worker poets featuring some of the poets as well as Das, Pang and Banglar Kantha editor AKM Mohsin.

For more info on the contest, visit http://www.singaporeworkerpoetry.com/. Deadline for submission of entries is on Nov 1. The Singapore Writers Festival panel on migrant worker poets will be held on Nov 8, 2.30pm, at The Arts House. For more information, visit https://www.singaporewritersfestival.com