Boey kim cheng biography books

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Poetry

1989 – Somewhere-bound. Singapore: Times Books International.

1992 – Another Place. 1st Ed. Singapore: Times Books International. 2nd Ed. Singapore, Times Editions, 2004.

1996 – Days of No Name. Singapore: EPB Publishers Pte. Ltd.

2003 – Losing Alexandria. Australia: Giramondo.

2006 – After the Fire: New and Selected Poems. Singapore: Firstfruits Publications.

2012 – Clear Brightness: New Poems. Singapore: Epigram Books; Australia: Puncher & Wattman.

2022 – The Singer and Other Poems. Australia: Cordite Books.

Fiction

2017 – Gull Between Heaven and Earth. Singapore: Epigram Books.

Non-Fiction

2009 – Between Stations: Essays. 1st Ed. Australia: Giramondo. 2nd Ed. Singapore: Epigram Books, 2017.

Editorial

2013 – Contemporary Asian Australian Poets. Eds. Aitken, Adam, Boey Kim Cheng, and Michelle Cahill. Australia: Puncher & Wattmann.

2019 – To Gather Your Leaving: Asian Diaspora Poetry from America, Australia, UK and Europe. Eds. Boey, Kim Cheng, Arin Alycia Fong, and Justin Chia. Singapore: Ethos Books.

SELECTED POEMS: “The Planners” >

The native form of this personal name is Kim Cheng Boey. This article uses Western name order when mentioning individuals.

Singapore-born Australian poet

Boey Kim Cheng (梅健青; born 1965) is a Singaporean Australianpoet.

As a student, Boey won the National University of Singapore Poetry Writing/Creative Prose Competition and has since received the National Arts Council's Young Artist Award (1996). He taught creative writing at the University of Newcastle in Australia from 2003 to 2016. In 2016, Boey joined the Nanyang Technological University, where he was associate professor at the School of Humanities, but stepped down as Head of its English department in 2020.

Early life

Boey was born in Singapore in 1965. He received his secondary education at Victoria School and graduated with Bachelor of Arts and Masters of Arts degrees in English Literature from the National University of Singapore. In 1993, he won a scholarship from the Goethe-Institut to pursue German. He was sponsored by the United States Information Agency to attend the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Boey embarked on a doctoral program with the National University of Singapore which he later discontinued. He entered the workforce and was employed by the Ministry of Community Development as a probation officer.

Disillusioned with the state of literary and cultural politics in Singapore, Boey left for Sydney with his wife in 1997 and became an Australian citizen. He completed his PhD studies with Macquarie University.

Career and achievements

In 1987, while studying as an undergraduate, Boey won the first and second prizes at the National University of Singapore Poetry Writing/Creative Prose Competition. At age 24, he published his first collection of p

In the virtual meeting room, my face is the only one on the screen: a digital mirror, a projection of my physical self, translated into pixels and data. I am waiting for the poet Boey Kim Cheng to join me – somewhere between Sydney, Australia, where I am, and Mount Sinai, Singapore, where he is. It is perhaps fitting that we are communing in this liminal space, for Boey has made a career, of sorts, exploring in-betweenness and the shades of grey in human existence.

Between pages, books, stations, between one life
and the next the list of the disappeared grows

‘The Disappearing Suite’, Clear Brightness

Boey Kim Cheng was born in 1965 in Singapore, the year of the nation’s independence. In 1997, he left with his wife, Wah Fong, to make a life in Australia, only to move back again to Singapore in 2016, this time as an expatriate academic. Yet ‘home’, for him, is in Berowra, NSW, where he longs to return.

This peripatetic life is echoed in his literary output over a 40-year career: five books of poems, a collection of travel essays, as well as a novel, a fictionalised biography of the Tang dynasty poet Du Fu. Boey has also edited two collections of Asian diasporic poetry: Contemporary Asian Australian Poets, with Michelle Cahill and Adam Aitken, and To Gather Your Leaving: Asian Diaspora Poetry from America, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Europe, with Arin Fong and Justin Chia.

I, too, was born in Singapore. Like Boey, I left Singapore permanently for Australia. I first came across Boey’s poems as a teenager. I had started to read poetry as a 16-year old, and I found three collections of Boey’s poems on the shelf in a bookshop – Somewhere-Bound (1989), Another Place (1992), and Days of No Name (1996).

I wasn’t to meet the poet himself until 2006, albeit briefly, when he visited a school in Singapore where I was a teacher, for a reading to students from his then-new book of poems,

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 Leavingin 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 Leavingin 2019.

In 2022, Boey’s collection The Singer and Other Poemswas published by Cordite Books. It wa