Cyril Wong (b. 1977)
BIOGRAPHY
Cyril Wong is the author of poetry collections such as Unmarked Treasure (2012), Tilting Our Plates to Catch the Light (2012), The Dictator’s Eyebrow (2013), After You (2013), and The Lover's Inventory (2015). His most recent collections are Infinity Diary (2020) and Beachlight (2023), published with Seagull Books. A recipient of the 2005 National Arts Council’s Young Artist Award and the 2006 and 2016 Singapore Literature Prize, he studied at St. Patrick’s School and Temasek Junior College, and completed his doctoral degree in English Literature at the National University of Singapore in 2012.
According to The Routledge Concise History of Southeast Asian Writing in English, “Wong has many styles, all of them limber, which combine the anecdotal and the confessional with the intuitive and the empathetic”. The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry in English describes him thus: “[Wong] has been most often labelled a confessional poet on the basis of the brutally candid sexuality in his poetry, along with a barely submerged anxiety over the fragility of human connection and a relentless self-querying”.
Wong served at various times as a creative-writing instructor for the Singapore Association for Mental Health and the Ministry of Education’s Creative Arts Programme, an arts manager at The Substation, as well as a book and performing arts reviewer for The Straits Times. Besides poetry, he also published two collections of short stories and two novels, most recently This Side of Heaven (2020).
He appeared at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Singapore Literature Festival in New York, the Hong Kong International Literary Festival, the Sydney, Melbourne and Byron Bay Writers Festivals, Vietnam’s first Asia-Pacific Poetry Festival, the Utan Kayu International Literary Biennale, and the Ubud Readers and Writers Festival. His poems were interpreted through dance at the 2004 Queensland Poetry Festival and his verse monologue, "Still Flight", was presented at the 2005 Magdalena International Festival of Women in Contemporary Theatre (USA). At the Seoul Fringe Festival, he performed as a renegade countertenor.
Author Photo © Jon Gresham. Author Biography © Cyril Wong. All rights reserved.
