Alvin Pang (b. 1972)
BIOGRAPHY
Alvin Pang (冯啟明) is a poet, writer, editor, anthologist and translator. He was Singapore’s Young Artist of the Year for Literature in 2005 and received the Singapore Youth Award for Arts and Culture in 2007, and the JCCI Foundation Education Award in 2008.
His poems have been translated into over fifteen languages, and he has appeared in major festivals and publications worldwide. He is among only a handful of poets from Singapore to be listed in the Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry in English (2nd Edition, 2013).
His books include City of Rain (2003), , Other Things and Other Poems (Croatia, 2012) and When the Barbarians Arrive, published in the UK in 2012. Most recently, he published a collection of selected and new works, What Happened: Poems 1997-2017 (2017). His collection of short prose, What Gives Us Our Names (2011), has sold more than 10,000 copies to date.
He has translated selected poems by Cultural Medallion awardee Yeng Pwang Ngon (英培安) for publication in English in 2010, and was the curating editor of the pan-literary anthology TUMASIK: Contemporary Writing from Singapore (Autumn Hill, USA: 2009). His short fiction has also been selected as one of the year’s Best New Singapore Short Stories (Epigram, 2013).
Among many international commissions, he was guest editor for a Singapore-focussed issue of the Prairie Schooner (USA) “Fusion” series published in 2014, as well as of the “Union” folio for Drunken Boat (USA) in 2015.
A Fellow of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program (2002), he is a Board Member of the International Poetry Studies Institute, based in the University of Canberra. He is also a founding director of The Literary Centre—a non-profit initiative dedicated to interdisciplinary capacity, multilingual communication, and positive social change.
An experienced literary communicator and teacher, he represented Singapore at London’s Poetry Parnassus event, part of the 2012 Olympic celebrations, and that same year appeared in the Worlds literary festival and salon in Norwich, alongside J M Coetzee, Teju Cole, Tim Parks and other luminaries. He was also invited to speak at the Translation Centre of the London Book Far 2013, where he also participated in Singapore’s first ever LBF presence. In 2014, he was invited to speak on a panel at the AWP Conference in Seattle; he was also guest panellist at the 53rd Silliman University National Writers Workshop in the Philippines—Asia’s oldest creative writing workshop. He taught Poetry Writing at Yale-NUS College in 2015.
Author Photo and Biography © Alvin Pang. All rights reserved.
