LEE Tzu Pheng, Anne, born in Singapore, retired as Associate Professor in English Literature from the National University of Singapore where she taught for 32 years. She is author of seven collections of poetry, Prospect Of A Drowning (1980), Against The Next Wave (1988), The Brink Of An Amen (1991), Lambada By Galilee & Other Surprises (1997), Sing A Song Of Mankind (2012), Catching Connections (2012), and Standing In The Corner (2014); a relatively modest output but which has won her numerous awards, including the Singapore National Book Development Council Award for Poetry (three times), the Singapore Cultural Medallion for Literature (1985), the SEA (South East Asia) WRITE Award (1987), the Montblanc-CFA (Centre for the Arts) Literary Award (1996), and the Gabriela Mistral Award from the Republic of Chile (1995) commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral’s winning of the Nobel prize for Literature. Lee was the only Singaporean among 50 writers worldwide honoured with this award. In addition to poetry, Lee has a book for parents on reading-readiness in children, Growing Readers (1987), and a book of prose reflections titled Short Circuits (2012). Soul’s Festival is a compilation from her first four collections which are now out of print.
In 2014, Lee was on the inaugural list of 108 women inducted into the Singapore Women’s Hall of Fame (www.swhf.sg), established to honour the women who had made an impact on the nation and shaped society with their humanity, talent and creativity, vision, passion and leadership.
In 2017, Lee was honoured by being featured solely as one of the nation’s Literary Pioneers at the Singapore Writers Festival. In 2020, her iconic poem “My Country And My People” was adopted as the theme poem for the M1 Fringe Festival of Arts. In 2018 she received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore.
