The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye (2016)

Won: Singapore Literature Prize, English fiction, 2016. The first graphic novel to win the prize's English fiction category, and a win with an edge: Singapore's National Arts Council had withdrawn a publishing grant the year before, saying the book's retelling of history could undermine the government's authority. Sonny Liew invents a forgotten Singaporean cartoonist and presents his life's work, drawn in a succession of period styles, as a way to retell the country's political history through the people who lost its arguments. Readers who enjoy books like Nabokov's Pale Fire, where the fiction hides inside a fake scholarly frame, will find a comics equivalent here.