Christine Chia (b. 1979)
BIOGRAPHY
Christine Chia is the author of The Law of Second Marriages (2011) and Separation: a History (2014). She is the co-editor of the groundbreaking poetry anthologies A Luxury We Cannot Afford (2014) and A Luxury We Must Afford (2016), and was a featured writer for the Singapore Literature Festival in New York. She recently edited Lines Spark Code (2017), a collection of Singapore poetry for the A-level examinations.
On The Law of Second Marriages, Alfian Sa’at noted that “This has to be one of my favourite poetry collections in recent times. The poems speak of various cruelties not with woefulness but almost crystalline dispassion. This is a poet who can write about pain like a draughtsman using pin on skin,” while Alvin Pang said, “this is Singapore’s best recent example of the poetry of memoir”. Cyril Wong added that it is “dark and damaged, and yet so hopeful all at the same time”.
Philip Holden, in his QLRS review of Separation: a History, says of Chia that “it’s a tribute to her talent as a poet that Chia produces the kind of moment that Yeats wrote of, a moment that results from the convergence of two stories, but is ultimately bound by neither”.
A graduate of The New School (New York) and the National University of Singapore, she is one of over 50 writers from Singapore and Malaysia whose works are excerpted in W!LD RICE’s original production of Another Country (2015).
Author Photo © Jon Gresham. Biography © Christine Chia. All rights reserved.
