SINGAPORE – Singapore-born Australian poet Boey Kim Cheng has won the Kenneth Slessor Prize For Poetry for his collection, The Singer And Other Poems, published in 2022.
The A$30,000 (S$26,800) prize comes under the New South Wales (NSW) Premier’s Literary Awards, the richest and longest-running state-based literary awards in Australia dating back to 1979.
“I am truly surprised by joy, to quote (English poet William) Wordsworth,” says Boey, who received the prize in person at the State Library of NSW on Monday.
In a speech delivered at the awards ceremony, he adds: “As always, my love and gratitude to my family, always my inspiration – my sister, my son, my daughter, my wife, always there for me – and my mother for whom my words were always too late, too slow.”
Boey tells The Straits Times in a phone call from Sydney: “I really thought I was a bit of a dark horse. (Those whom) I’d been shortlisted with are really wonderful poets who are acclaimed and have won prizes, whereas my work is still relatively unknown in Australia.”
Published by Australia-based Cordite Books, the 58-year-old’s newest book is a stylistic watershed – containing some of the longest, most lyrical lines in his oeuvre – even as he revisits familiar themes of memory, history and place from the vantage point of a mature artist.
In a citation for the prize, the judges write: “This is a poetry of diasporic complexity and grace, where locations are lodged in memory and recalled with elegance, but also at an immense cost… This is rhapsodic, restless writing where wandering slides into wondering.”
The judging panel includes Australian poets Lachlan Brown, Felicity Plunkett and Eileen Chong, who was also born in Singapore.
Prizes in 13 other categories were also announced, including the NSW Premier’s Translation Prize which was won by translator Tiffany Tsao, who grew up in Singapore, and the late Indonesian writer Budi Darma for People From Bloomington (2022).
The Singer And Other Poems comes 10 years after Boey’s last book of poems, Clear Brightness (2012), which was shortlisted for the John Bray Poetry Award and the NSW Premier’s Multicultural Award. Clear Brightness was also selected as one of the 50 greatest works of Singapore Literature by The Straits Times.
The author of six poetry collections released his first book, Somewhere-Bound, in 1989 – interrogating personal and national history as a wide-eyed 24-year-old undergraduate and winning the National Book Development Council of Singapore’s award for poetry.
His second collection, Another Place (1992), was selected as an A-level English literature text from 2005 to 2015. In 1996, Boey was awarded the Young Artist Award from the National Arts Council.
In 1997, he emigrated from Singapore to Australia and published collections such as the travel memoir Between Stations (2009), which dealt with themes of migration and homesickness.
He returned to Singapore and has been an associate professor at the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University since 2016.
In 2017, he released his first novel – Gull Between Heaven And Earth – which imagines the life of Tang dynasty poet-in-exile Du Fu, translating several of his poems.
Boey, who is preparing for retirement in 2023, says of his first time back in Australia since the Covid-19 pandemic: “I felt a deep sense of homecoming that I’ve never felt before. Finally, perhaps, I can call this place home.”
While he feels the prize money will come in handy for retirement, it is more about “the sense of acceptance, that I’ve finally found a place here in Australia among the other Australian writers”.
It is perhaps revealing that the Australian writer he feels most affinity with is Ee Tiang Hong, the late Malaysian poet who emigrated to Perth, a neglected name Boey had included in an anthology he co-edited, Contemporary Asian Australian Poets (2013).
Boey, who penned the lines “You are not in your country but it is alive / in you”, says: “Although I feel like (Australia) is more home than ever, I don’t think that sense of being in between places will go away.”
