Sandy Rompotiyoke is a British-Thai writer, architect, and artist based in London. She is the winner of the 2026 Merky Books New Writers’ Prize.

Her debut novel, Hallowed Land, is a lyrical, intergenerational story following three Thai women of Chinese descent between Southern Thailand and the UK. Weaving myth, memory, and political residue, the novel explores grief, inheritance, and the restless condition of belonging across homelands. It addresses the need to nourish cultures threatened by displacement and forgetting.

Her writing draws on folklore and ritual to illuminate underrepresented narratives, including the regional insurgency in Southern Thailand. For Sandy, fiction is a way of deepening reality, not denying it – a form of remembering that holds what formal records cannot. Central to her work is the idea of land as a living archive: a witness to extraction, survival, and renewal.

This interest is informed by her family’s ties to the natural rubber trade and her work in landscape recovery. For several years, she has researched the Hevea brasiliensis rubber plantation, tracing its journey from South America to Southeast Asia and connecting personal history to wider ecological narratives.

Alongside her writing, Sandy leads award-winning regenerative projects in the UK and internationally. Her work, which includes major ecological and river restoration across various scales, is fundamentally rooted in participatory co-design with communities from underrepresented backgrounds. She has exhibited and lectured internationally – including Whitstable Biennale, the London Festival of Architecture, and Chisenhale Gallery – on how storytelling and design can drive meaningful social and environmental change.