Gwee Li Sui is a Singaporean poet, graphic artist, and literary critic. All his seven verse collections to date are published by Landmark Books. 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), and This Floating World (2021).
Gwee wrote and drew Singapore’s first long-form graphic novel in English Myth of the Stone in 1993. An expanded twentieth-anniversary edition of this title was released by Epigram Books in 2013. He also created a comic book on caregiving Old Heroes Solve Mystery for Lien Foundation in 2018 and a picture book Amazing Things, with Burmese translation by Nwe Nwe Aung, for Yinthway Foundation, Myanmar in 2020. His short fiction e-book 2719 was published by Ethos Books in 2020.
A familiar name in Singapore’s cultural scene, Gwee has been writing and lecturing on a wide range of subjects. His two influential non-fiction works are FEAR NO POETRY!: An Essential Guide to Close Reading (Ethos Books, 2014) and Spiaking Singlish: A Companion to How Singaporeans Communicate (Marshall-Cavendish International, 2017). His Singlish translation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s classic The Little Prince was published as The Leeter Tunku (2019) by Edition Tintenfaß, Germany in 2019. Gwee has edited numerous acclaimed anthologies. These include Sharing Borders: Studies in Contemporary Singaporean-Malaysian Literature II (2009), Telltale: Eleven Stories (2010), Man/Born/Free: Writings on the Human Spirit from Singapore (2011), Singathology: Fifty New Works by Celebrated Singaporean Writers (2015) and Places: A Graphic Anthology on the East of Singapore (2016). Landmark Books published his anthology Written Country: The History of Singapore through Literature in 2016.
