Gwee Li Sui (b. 1970)
BIOGRAPHY
Gwee Li Sui is a poet with eight works of verse to date. They are Who Wants to Buy a Book of Poems? (1998), One Thousand and One Nights (2014), Who Wants to Buy an Expanded Edition of a Book of Poems? (2015), The Other Merlion and Friends (2015), Haikuku (2017), Death Wish (2017), This Floating World (2021), and Look How We’ve Already Forgotten (2025).
He wrote and drew Singapore’s first long-form graphic novel in English, Myth of the Stone (1993). This was re-released in an expanded twentieth-anniversary edition in 2013. He also wrote a poetry guide FEAR NO POETRY!: An Essential Guide to Close Reading (2014) and a language guide Spiaking Singlish: A Companion to How Singaporeans Communicate (2017).
In recent years, he has been actively translating literary classics into Singlish too. Works so far include Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Leeter Tunku (2019, The Little Price), Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Labbit (2021, The Tale of Peter Rabbit), Grimms’ Fairy Tales in Singlish (2021), A. A. Milne’s Winne-da-Pooh (2023, Winnie-the-Pooh), and George Orwell’s Kaka Farm (2024, Animal Farm).
Gwee has a doctorate from Queen Mary, University of London for his study of Newtonian influence in the poetry of the long eighteenth century. He is a familiar name in Singapore’s literary scene and has further edited several literary anthologies and lectured on a range of cultural subjects.
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