Christine Chia (b. 1979)
BIOGRAPHY
Christine Chia is the author of The Law of Second Marriages (2011) and Separation: a History (2014). She is the co-editor of the groundbreaking poetry anthologies A Luxury We Cannot Afford (2014) and A Luxury We Must Afford (2016), and was a featured writer for the Singapore Literature Festival in New York. She recently edited Lines Spark Code (2017), a collection of Singapore poetry for the A-level examinations.
Alfian Sa’at named The Law of Second Marriages as “one of [his] favourite poetry collections in recent times”. He said its poems “speak of various cruelties not with woefulness but almost crystalline dispassion” and described Chia as “a poet who can write about pain like a draughtsman using pin on skin.” Alvin Pang once described the book as “Singapore’s best recent example of the poetry of memoir,” with Cyril Wong adding that it is “dark and damaged, and yet so hopeful all at the same time.”
Philip Holden, in his QLRS review of Separation: a History, called it “a tribute to her talent as a poet that Chia produces the kind of moment that Yeats wrote of, a moment that results from the convergence of two stories, but is ultimately bound by neither”.
A graduate of The New School (New York) and the National University of Singapore, she is one of over 50 writers from Singapore and Malaysia whose works are excerpted in W!LD RICE’s original production of Another Country (2015). Since 2018, Chia has been writing a play tentatively titled Margie’s Dreams, after taking a series of playwriting workshops from Haresh Sharma that same year; the play went through the Script Circle treatment from Centre 42 in 2024, which involved a closed-door dramatic reading by Jo Tan, Edward Choy and Zelda Tatiana Ng.
References
Chia, Christine. The Law of Second Marriages. Singapore: Math Paper Press, 2014.
Holden, Phillip. “Millefeuille”. QLRS, Vol. 13 No. 4 Oct 2014.
Author Photo © Vipul Singhvi. Author Biography © Christine Chia. All rights reserved.
