Gwee Li Sui is a well-loved Singaporean poet, graphic artist, and literary critic. He has six books of verse to date: 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), and Death Wish (2017). Floating World, with nearly four hundred haikus, will be published this year.
Gwee’s first book Myth of the Stone (1993) was Singapore’s first long-form graphic novel in English. This fantasy title was re-released in an expanded twentieth-anniversary edition in 2013. Gwee also created a comic book on caregiving, called Old Heroes Solve Mystery, in 2018. In 2020, his first picture book Amazing Things was published in English and Burmese in Myanmar.
Gwee further wrote two bestselling nonfiction titles: a guide to poetry analysis, FEAR NO POETRY! (2014), and a companion to Singaporean English, Spiaking Singlish (2017). The Leeter Tunku (2019), his Singlish translation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince published in Germany, became the world’s first Singlish translation of a classic. He also edited a number of critically acclaimed literary anthologies.
A stalwart of Singapore’s cultural scene, Gwee has taught at a few international universities and institutions and written on a wide range of subjects. His series of public lectures on literature has been well-received for almost a decade. He is both writer and presenter of Yahoo! Singapore’s flagship video programme “Singlish with Uncle Gwee”. Gwee was a writer-in-residence at Toji Cultural Centre in Wonju in 2010.
