Boey Kim Cheng (b. 1965)
BIOGRAPHY
Boey Kim Cheng emigrated from Singapore in 1997 to Australia, eventually settling in Berowra, New South Wales.
He began writing in Victoria Secondary School and published his first collection Somewhere-Bound (1989) when he was at the National University of Singapore. It won the National Book Development Council Award in 1989. Another Place (1992) followed, and was chosen as a GCE “A” level text from 2005 to 2015. Days of No Name (1996), written during the international writing residency in Iowa, won the Merit award in the Singapore Literature Prize in 1995. In 1996, Boey was given the Young Artist Award.
While in Australia, Boey completed a PhD at the University of Macquarie and taught creative writing at the University of Newcastle. As an Asian Australian poet, Boey has published After the Fire: New and Selected Poems (2006), and a travel memoir entitled Between Stations (2009), which was shortlisted for the W.A. Premier’s Literary Award for Nonfiction. Clear Brightness (2012), published in Australia by Puncher & Wattmann and in Singapore by Epigram Books, was shortlisted for the John Bray Poetry Prize and the NSW Premier’s Multicultural Award. It replaced Another Place as a GCE “A” level text in 2016. Boey wrote his first novel, Gull Between Heaven and Earth, in 2017, on the life of Chinese poet Du Fu. He also edited a collection of Asian diasporic poetry from America, Australia, UK and Europe, To Gather Your Leaving in 2020.
Boey co-founded Mascara Literary Review, the first Australian literary journal to promote Asian Australian writing, and co-edited the groundbreaking anthology Contemporary Asian Australian Poets (2013). He also edited a collection of Asian diasporic poetry from America, Australia, UK and Europe, To Gather Your Leaving in 2019.
In 2022, Boey’s collection The Singer and Other Poems was published by Cordite Books. It was awarded the Kenneth Slessor Prize For Poetry under the New South Wales (NSW) Premier’s Literary Awards in 2023. In their citation for Boey’s collections, the judges wrote, “This is a poetry of diasporic complexity and grace, where locations are lodged in memory and recalled with elegance, but also at an immense cost […] This is rhapsodic, restless writing where wandering slides into wondering.”
In 2013, Boey returned to Singapore as one of the Nanyang Technological University's writers-in-residence, and served as an Associate Professor at the Division of English. In 2023, he retired and returned to Berowra, Australia.
Author Photo © Boey Kim Cheng. Author Biography © Jonathan Chan. All rights reserved.
