Description
The official exhibition and accompanying book, The Albatross File, promised to disclose the inside story of Singapore’s separation from Malaysia. But the newly declassified documents point to something more unsettling.
Based on a close reading of these records, The Albatross File Unredacted challenges the official account of Lee Kuan Yew as a leader overtaken by events. It shows instead that Lee was not merely swept along by history: his choices helped push Singapore towards separation. The result is a fuller, more human portrait of Lee: not as myth, but as a brilliant and forceful political actor whose triumphs and failures shaped the birth of independent Singapore.
About the Author
Thum Ping Tjin (“PJ”) is Founder of New Naratif, a movement to democratise democracy in Southeast Asia. He is an award-winning writer, Rhodes Scholar, Commonwealth Scholar, Olympic athlete, and the first Singaporean to swim the English Channel. His work is on Malayan nationalism and decolonisation and, more broadly, Southeast Asian governance and politics. He has a doctorate in history from Oxford, where he was also a fellow between 2014 and 2022. His most recent work is Nationalism and Decolonisation in Singapore: The Malayan Generation, 1953-63 (Routledge, 2024).
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