The Best of Kirpal Singh

“A wise creative mentor to many, and a beautiful poet for all. To read him is to profoundly experience inspiration itself.”
—Dillon McKinsey

“Kirpal Singh began writing poems as a young schoolboy. He has been faithful to his calling as a bard…Underlying his poetry there is the desire to make us see, to make us realise our full humanity when the masks come off…Kirpal sings out to Singaporeans to break out of the lion’s cage.”
—Peter Nazareth, writer, critic and Professor of English, University of Iowa

Kirpal Singh is a poet, fictionist and cultural critic, and is currently Director of the Wee Kim Wee Centre at the Singapore Management University where he also teaches creative writing. He was a founding member of the Centre for Research in New Literatures at Flinders University, Australia, in 1977, served for many years as chairman of the Singapore Writers' Festival in the 1990s and has the distinction of being the first Asian director of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 1993 and 1994.

He is an internationally recognised scholar whose core research areas include post-colonial literature, Singapore and Southeast Asian literature and technology, and creativity thinking. His research articles and critical writings have been published in international journals such as Ariel, Diogene, Commonwealth Novel In English, Literary Criterion, Quadrant, Southern Review and Westerly.

He has written four books of poetry, two collections of stories and edited over twenty-five publications, including the prestigious literary journal, World Literature Written in English. He has attended international writers' festivals all over the world, in places such as Adelaide, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Mexico, USA, Toronto and Kent.

In addition, Singh is a member of several international literary journals and associations. In 2010, he represented Singapore at the Shanghai World Expo. Currently, he is also involved in conceptualising and promoting creative thinking in Singapore's undergraduate education system at the Singapore Management University. In 2004, Singh became the first Asian and non-American to be made a director on the American Creativity Association's (ACA) board where he is now Vice-President and Chair of ACA International.