Aaron Lee (b. 1972)
BIOGRAPHY
Aaron Lee Soon Yong (b. Johor Bahru, Malaysia) studied at Raffles Institution and Raffles Junior College as a Public Service Commission Humanities Scholar, and went on to earn a law degree at the National University of Singapore, specialising in international and banking law. He became a citizen of Singapore in 1996, and has worked in the banking and finance industry since the late 1990s. It was then that he and some friends played a key part in the Singaporean resurgence of poetry writing in English.
He started writing poetry in his early teens, and has authored three poetry collections: A Visitation of Sunlight (1997), Five Right Angles (2007) and Coastlands (2014). His first collection won a National Book Development Council award and the second was shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize. He also won the first prize in the 1994/95 National University of Singapore Poetry Writing Competition and the third prize in the 1995 New Straits Times-Shell Poetry Competition in Malaysia. He co-edited the pioneering anthology No Other City: The Ethos Anthology of Urban Poetry (2000), and Love Gathers All: The Philippines-Singapore Anthology of Love Poems (2002). More recently, he co-edited Lines Spark Code with Christine Chia, an anthology of Singapore poetry commissioned by the Ministry of Education for study at A-levels.
Lee’s poetry is widely read and taught in schools, and he has performed his work and spoken at literary events all over the world. He is married to the multi-disciplinary artist Namiko Chan Takahashi, and they are actively involved in community arts and mentoring.
Author Photo and Biography © Aaron Lee. All rights reserved.
