Look inside the book
Singapore-born poet Boey Kim Cheng meditates on emigration and loss during a year of travelling after leaving his native land to settle in Australia. He makes detours through India, China, Egypt and Morocco, haunted by the memories of family and vestiges of old Singapore. This travel memoir is being published in Singapore for the first time, and includes a new afterword by Boey and new photos. It was first published in Australia in 2009.
"[Between Stations] is a meditative and poignant travelogue/memoir that beautifully captures that unsettled sense of in-between-ness. As the title suggests, the author is leaving one place (Singapore) and going to another (Australia), but has yet to let go of the past or truly arrive. Always on the outside looking in, Boey delicately examines the persistence of memory and the pull of family no matter how far one journeys."
— Damon Chua, playwright, in "My Book of the Year 2019", Singapore Unbound
“Philosophical and poetic”
— Cyril Wong
“Profoundly anti-conformist"
— Shirley Geok-lin Lim
“One of the most imaginative contributions to the evolving, deepening and darkening corpus of Singapore literature today.”
— Shirley Geok-lin Lim
"Between Stations is about travelling through India, Pakistan, North Africa and China but on a deeper level is a series of meditative essays on the subtle interplay between travel, memory, childhood, family and poetry bound together by a personal story of migration and expatriation.”
—The Sydney Morning Herald
Boey Kim Cheng is a multi-award-winning Singapore-born poet, and a 1996 recipient of the National Arts Council’s Young Artist Award. He emigrated to Australia in 1997, but returned in 2013 as one of Nanyang Technological University's writers-in-residence; he is currently Associate Professor in the NTU Division of English. He co-founded Mascara Literary Review in 2007, the first Australian literary journal to promote Asian Australian writing, and in 2013 co-edited the groundbreaking anthology Contemporary Asian Australian Poets. Boey has published five collections of poetry, including Clear Brightness (selected by The Straits Times as one of the Best Books of 2012), as well as Between Stations, a celebrated travel memoir reissued by Epigram Books in 2017. His writing is frequently studied in tertiary and university institutions in Singapore and abroad. Gull Between Heaven and Earth is his first novel.
