“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. Sutanto started out writing dark suspense, and says her friends would tell her that her characters were “too flippant about murder”. “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. 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. “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. It was her husband, who is English, who suggested she write about her family because “they’re just so out there”. 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”. Sutanto, who did a master’s in creative writing at Oxford, has previously written children’s and young adult novels. I needed to have a moment to let it sink in.” He said, ‘I’m literally not’, and then it hit me and I had to have a moment because that’s just too big. And my five-year-old was like, wow, and I said ‘Oh, no, Papa is just exaggerating’. “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’.

“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. 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.

Dial a for aunties by jesse q sutanto