Alvin Pang

A recipient of several Singapore International Foundation and National Arts Council grants, Pang frequently assists the National Arts Council in literary projects. He served on the organising committees of the Singapore Writer's Festival in 1997, 1999, 2001 and 2003. He is also a founder and coordinator of "WORDFEAST 2004" – Singapore's first international poetry festival. He was the 2009 Poet-In-Residence at Raffles Institution, his father's and his alma mater. Pang has made several international appearances in support of Singaporean writing. He led a delegation of Singapore writers to Australia in July 2001 and another to the Austin International Poetry Festival in April 2002. He featured at the 2003 Edinburgh International Book Festival and the 2006 Sydney Writer's Festival as an invited international poet. He has also read at literary festivals and events in Albany, Bali, Byron Bay, Cape Town, Darwin, Finland, Geraldton, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, London, Ledbury, the Philippines, Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Slovenia, L'viv, Zagreb and elsewhere. He was a participant at the Worlds 2012 literary gathering in Norwich, and represented Singapore at the Poetry Parnassus festival – part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad in London. A former teacher, civil servant, journalist, columnist and online producer, Pang pioneered an early online poetry anthology, The Poetry Billboard, and a Literary Singapore news website and mailing list. He has also contributed an occasional column to the Straits Times commentary section on technology, culture, society and other issues. In 2003, Pang co-founded The Literary Centre (Singapore), a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to literary development, interdisciplinary capacity, multicultural communication, and positive social change, which he continues to direct. In 2012, he was appointed to the advisory board of the International Poetry Studies Institute, based in the University of Canberra. He also serves on the international editorial board of Axon, a peer-reviewed journal that focuses on the characteristics of creativity and the creative process. In 2022, he was a judge of the International Dublin Literary Award. Pang consults on web, editorial and strategic communications, and research for a range of corporate and public sector organisations, and facilitates training and development programmes for schools and broader audiences. He is also Editor-in-Chief of a professional public sector journal, Ethos.

Poetry • 1997 – Testing the Silence • 2003 – City of Rain / 978-981-08-4731-9 • 2006 – Other Things (chapbook of unpublished poems) • 2012 – Other things and other poems (New and Selected Poems, with Croatian translation) (Brutal, Croatia) • 2012 – When the Barbarians Arrive (Arc publications, UK) (pbk) (hbk) • 2012 – Teorija strun String Theory (Selected poems in Slovene translation) (JSKD, Slovenia) • 2015 – När barbarerna kommer (Selected poems in Swedish translation) (Rámus, Sweden) • 2016 – Собата во пламен (Selected poems in Macedonian translation) (Antolog, Macedonia) • 2017 – 1=What Happened: Poems 1997-2017 • 2019 – Uninterrupted time (Recent Work Press) • 2023 - Diaphanous (with George Szirtes) (Recent Work Press) • 2025 - All That Is Left Of The Sea (Red River Press) Creative Prose & Related Arts • 2011 – What Gives Us Our Names • 2022 – Det som ger oss våra namn (Ramus Forlag, Sweden), translated by Henrik C. Enbohm • 2024 – What Gives Us Our Names: Rosetta Edition (Rosetta Cultures, Singapore) • 2025 – Lo que nos da nuestros nombres (Perro Azul, Costa Rica), translated by Luis Chacón Ortiz Anthologies (as editor) • 2000 – No Other City: The Ethos Anthology of Urban Poetry (with Aaron Lee) • 2002 – Love Gathers All: The Philippines-Singapore Love Anthology (with Aaron Lee, Ramon Sunico and Alfred Yuson) • 2008 – Over There: Poems from Singapore and Australia (with John Kinsella) • 2009 – Double Skin: New Poetic Voices from Italy and Singapore (with Tiziano Fratus) • 2009 – TUMASIK: Contemporary Writing from Singapore (Autumn Hill, USA) • 2011 – Moving Words 2011: A Poetry Anthology • 2015 – UNION: 15 years of Drunken Boat / 50 years of writing from Singapore (with Ravi Shankar) Translations • 2010 – The Poems of Yeng Pway Ngon – Vol 1: Rebellion (with Goh Beng Choo)