Roving poet Boey Kim Cheng returns to his Singapore roots

A decade after taking Australian citizenship, award-winning poet Boey Kim Cheng continues to write about Singapore as home.

Leaving the country made him realise how deep his roots went, says the 48-year-old writer, whose poems are on the A-level syllabus for English literature here. His latest collection of verses, Clear Brightness, was published simultaneously by Epigram Books in Singapore and Puncher and Wattman in Australia.

“From being a sort of estranged and displaced writer, it was a pleasant shock to feel part of the literary culture,” he says on a recent trip here to launch the book and visit family.

He left Singapore in 1996 to do his doctorate at Macquarie University in Sydney, and was determined at the time to give up writing for good.

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Roving poet Boey Kim Cheng returns to his Singapore roots