Theophilus Kwek (b. 1994)
BIOGRAPHY
Theophilus Kwek is a writer, translator, and editor. He has published four collections of poetry, They Speak Only Our Mother Tongue (2011), Circle Line (2013), Giving Ground (2016) and Moving House (2020). Both Circle Line and Giving Ground were shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize, in 2014 and 2018 respectively. He has also published a pamphlet, The First Five Storms (2017), which was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Award and won the inaugural New Poets’ Prize. In 2023, he was the youngest writer and first Singaporean to be awarded the Cikada Prize by the Swedish Institute for poetry that “defends the inviolability of life”. He was also the first Singaporean to be appointed to the Folio Academy, an international panel of writers and critics who select the prestigious Writers’ Prize (formerly the Rathbones Folio Prize).
Theophilus began writing as a student at Raffles Institution under the mentorship of Alvin Pang, Aaron Maniam and others. Since then, he has been featured at the Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam, Ledbury Poetry Festival, Singapore Writers Festival and elsewhere; and his poems, essays, reviews and translations have appeared in publications such as The Guardian, The Irish Examiner, Times Literary Supplement, The London Magazine, and The Straits Times. He has collaborated widely with artists and composers, including with Alex Ho on works commissioned by the National Opera Studio, Royal Opera House and Oxford Lieder Festival, as well as with Jonathan Shin on The Bright-Eyed Otter, which premiered at the International Youth Opera Festival in Singapore. His collaboration with the painter Alvin Ong was published as a pamphlet, Ways of Walking, to raise funds for the UK-based nonprofit Refugee Resource.
Currently a member of the editorial team behind the Journal of Practice Research and Tangential Activities (PR&TA), Theophilus was previously also Co-Editor of Oxford Poetry, Editor-at-large at Asymptote, Poetry Editor of the Asian Books Blog, and Poetry Reader at The London Magazine. In 2016 he co-founded The Kindling, an online poetry journal, while serving as President of the Oxford University Poetry Society. He has also contributed to several projects to document Singapore’s literary history, including as Co-Editor of the anthologies UnFree Verse (2017), Who Are You My Country? (2018) and Some Dreams From Now (2023). He is now a mentor on the Creative Arts Programme, run by the Ministry of Education in Singapore, and counts it a privilege to teach creative writing from time to time with organisations such as Sing Lit Station, Ethos Books, Singapore Books Council and the National Library of Singapore.
Author Photo © Marc Nair. Author Biography © Theophilus Kwek. All rights reserved.
