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About Me
About Me
Conan Tan is a Singaporean Chinese writer based between the UK and Singapore. Currently, he is an undergraduate reading for a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of Oxford.
His writing has received numerous honours including the 2024 Martin Starkie Prize and First Place in Singapore’s 2022 National Poetry Competition. Most recently, he was a finalist for the 2025/26 Magma Poetry Competition and the 2024 Oxford Poetry Prize. He has received support from Sing Lit Station, Poetry Translation Centre UK, Barbican Centre as a Barbican Young Poet, and the Transylvania County Library Foundation. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Adroit, Ninth Letter, Pleiades, Salt Hill, Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere.
“At the lake, I discovered I was horrible at skipping stones. / The water in the way of my throw. / There were leaves leaning over to cradle me, / or what I could become. / Despite memory. / I was trying to be a person.”
— first published in London Writers’ Centre
“I’m trying to transparent / my shame into something beautiful. A depression / worthy of the Louvre. Vermeer deconstructed light / down to its photons and I can’t even / look the mirror in the eye.”
— first published in Salt Hill, reprinted in ONLY POEMS DAILY
“I was a ribbon of land. He bit my nose / like a claim. Area of an inch. I inched / from lawn to rumpus like a bad game / of telephone.”
— first published in Passages North
© 2024-26 Conan Tan. All rights reserved.
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