Cyril Wong

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Cyril Wong
Born June 27, 1977 (1977-06-27) (age 34)
Singapore
Occupation Poet and short story writer
Nationality Singaporean
Ethnicity Chinese
Education National University of Singapore
Notable award(s) Golden Point Award (Singapore, 2004), National Arts Council's Young Artist Award (Singapore, 2005), Singapore Literature Prize (2006)

Cyril Wong (born 1977) is the author of nine volumes of poetry and one collection of prose.[1]

Contents

[edit] Biography

Born in 1977, Cyril Wong attended Saint Patrick's School, Singapore and Temasek Junior College, before pursuing a doctoral degree in English literature from the National University of Singapore. His poems have appeared in journals around the world, including Atlanta Review, Fulcrum, Poetry International, Cimarron Review, Wascana Review, Dimsum, and Asia Literary Review. They have also been featured in the 2008 W.W. Norton & Co. anthology, Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond, and Chinese Erotic Poems by Everyman's Library. Cyril was guest editor for Gangway (#35 - Travel and Transitioning), and a featured poet at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Hong Kong International Literary Festival, the Sydney Writers' Festival, and the Singapore Writers' Festival. TIME magazine (Dec 10, 2007) has written that "his work expands beyond simple sexuality...to embrace themes of love, alienation and human relationships of all kinds."[2]

[edit] Cyril's Poetry

Cyril is recognised as Singapore's first truly confessional poet[3] and "has many styles, all of them limber, which combine the anecdotal and the confessional with the intuitive and the empathetic."[4] His poems are known for their "lyrical intensity" and for "training an almost anthropologically curious eye on the laws and customs of his own family: their strange taciturn ways, their gnomic references to disappointment and guilt, and their penchant for self-delusion."[5] In a way that makes him especially distinctive within the Singaporean poetry scene, his work possesses "a heightened awareness of the physical body, and a desire to probe its visceral materiality for emotional truths."[6] Edwin Thumboo has praised Cyril's poems for their "remarkable inwardness" and how, "without exception, they leave us with the feeling of subjects - occasion, non-happening, an especially poignant experience - explored to unusual limits."[7] With regards to his third collection and its play of presence and absence in the context of Singapore's urbanity and cultural memory, John Phillips described Cyril's poetry as offering "an affirmation of emptiness in a time and place where this is barely possible."[8]

Although Cyril has also been popularly known as a gay poet,[9] Singaporean critic Gwee Li Sui has stressed that readers need not perceive the poet's persona in terms of gay exceptionality, "his qualities of spaciousness and morphing images also manifesting an interest in a kind of New-Age irreligious spirituality."[10] This interest is fully expressed in Cyril's book, Satori Blues, in which the author "teases us out of our complacencies and directs/guides our thinking along the long, hard route to self-awareness...Hence 'blues'. Hence the extraordinary attempt to seduce the reader into somnambulance-via-rhythmic, rhymic language, the language of meditative poetry."[11] In a review by the Southeast Asian Review of English, Cyril's poetry has been described as "an art that works simply from a personal plane, and from within such a plane we have some of the most sensitive, articulate probings into the nature of one's self that have never been seen before in all of contemporary Singaporean verse."[12]

[edit] Books

[edit] eBook

  • Fires (Book Merah, 2009) ASIN: B002P8MPK8, Kindle Edition

[edit] Chapbooks

[edit] Awards

  • Singapore Literature Prize (2006)
  • National Arts Council's Young Artist Award (Singapore, 2005)
  • Golden Point Award (Singapore, 2004)

[edit] References

 Constructs such as ibid., loc. cit. and idem are discouraged by Wikipedia's style guide for footnotes, as they are easily broken. Please improve this article by replacing them with named references (quick guide), or an abbreviated title. (July 2010)
  1. ^ Writer's website
  2. ^ TIME Magazine (Asia Edition)
  3. ^ National Library, Singapore
  4. ^ Patke, Rajeev S. and and Philip Holden. "Contemporary poetry 1990-2008." The Routledge Concise History of Southeast Asian Writing in English. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2010. 185.
  5. ^ Holden, Philip, Angelia Poon and Shirley Geok-lin Lim, eds. "Section 2 (1965-1990): Introduction." Writing Singapore: An Historical Anthology of Singapore Literature. Singapore: NUS Press/NAC, 2009. 370-371.
  6. ^ Writing Singapore: An Historical Anthology of Singapore Literature. Singapore: NUS Press/NAC, 2009. 370-371.
  7. ^ Thumboo, Edwin. "Introduction" IN Cyril Wong's Squatting Quietly. Singapore: Firstfruits, 2000. 9.
  8. ^ Phillips, John. "The Future of the Past: Archiving Singapore." Urban Memory: History and Amnesia in the Modern City. Ed. Mark Crinson. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. 160.
  9. ^ TIME Magazine (Asia Edition)
  10. ^ "The New Poetry of Singapore." Sharing Borders: Studies in Contemporary Singaporean-Malaysian Literature II. Ed. Gwee Li Sui. Singapore: NLB/NAC 2009. 250.
  11. ^ Singh, Kirpal. "Poetic Meditations: Two Singaporean Poets and a Personal Reflection." Kunapipi. Vol. XXXII No. 1-2 Dec. 2010. 109-110.
  12. ^ Jeyam, Leonard. "The Poetry of Personal Revelation: Reviewing Cyril Wong's Unmarked Treasure." SARE. No. 47 Apr. 2006/07. 99.

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cyril_Wong&oldid=468356965"
Personal tools
Namespaces
Variants
Actions
Navigation
Interaction
Toolbox
Print/export
Languages