Gwee Li Sui (Chinese: 魏俐瑞; pinyin: Wèi Lìruì; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: Gūi Līsūi; Korean: 위리서; born 22 August 1970) is an acclaimed bestselling writer in Singapore. He works in poetry, comics, non-fiction, criticism, and translation. He is the author of Spiaking Singlish, possibly the first book on Singlish written entirely in Singlish, complete with colloquial spelling.
Gwee went to the now-defunct MacRitchie Primary School and then Anglo-Chinese Secondary School and Anglo-Chinese Junior College. In 1995, he graduated from the National University of Singapore with a First-Class Honours degree in English literature and was awarded the NUS Society Gold Medal for Best Student in English. His Honours thesis was on Günter Grass's novel The Tin Drum (German: Die Blechtrommel). His Master's thesis was on Hermann Broch's novel The Death of Virgil (German: Der Tod des Vergil).[1] In 1999, Gwee began his doctoral research on the period from the English Enlightenment to early German RomanticismatQueen Mary, University of London. His eventual thesis was on the discursive influence of Newtonianism on the poetry of Richard Blackmore, Alexander Pope, and Novalis.[2]
From 2003 to 2009, Gwee worked as an assistant professor at the NUS Department of English Language and Literature. He taught various courses on introductory world literature, 18th-century fiction, poetry, literary criticism and film criticism. Apart from English literature, philosophy and science, Gwee’s other research interests include British and German romanticism, modern German literature, Singapore literature as well as Reformation and modern theology.
Gwee has been a full-time writer since leaving academia. A popular speaker, he continues to instruct at various universities and institutions. He is sought for his opinions on literature, language, and religion and has been on the evaluation panel for several top literary awards in Singapore, Southeast Asia, and East Asia. In 2010, he was an international writer- and critic-in-residence at the Toji Cultural CentreinSouth Korea.[3]
From 2008 to 2011, Gwee hosted public interviews with Singaporean cultural figures at the independent bookstore BooksActually. From 2013 to 2017, he ran The Arts House's "Sing Lit 101: How to Read a Singaporean Poem" and gave five seasons of public lectures on important Singaporean poems.[4] From 2018 to 2022, he led National Library Board's "How to Fall in Love with Classics" series for ten seasons, focusing on literary classics in different mediums and genres. He also fronted Yahoo! Singapore's flagship TV programme "Singlish with Uncle Gwee" for four seasons from 2018 to 2020.[5]
Gwee wrote what is considered Singapore’s first long-form graphic novel in English Myth of the Stone, published in 1993. Earlier such collections had involved short comic stories. Myth of the Stone is part-children's story, part-fantasy, and part-allegory and follows a boy's adventures in a realm of mismatched mythical creatures. A twentieth-anniversary edition, with two new related stories among its bonuses, was published by Epigram Books in 2013.
Gwee's poetry is known for its versatility and involves a wide range of styles and moods. His first book of verse was the well-loved Who Wants to Buy a Book of Poems?, published in 1998. It is full of linguistic play, Singlish rhymes, and jabs at social history and culture.[6] About half of Who Wants to Buy an Expanded Edition of a Book of Poems?, published in 2015, concerns all the poems that could not be published in the first edition. The Straits Times named it one of the 50 greatest works of Singaporean literature in 2021.[7]
Gwee also famously writes on and in Singlish. In 2017, He published Spiaking Singlish: A Companion to How Singaporeans Communicate, which is hailed by pioneering Singlish writer Sylvia Toh as "the definitive book on Singlish".[8] In 2019, he translated Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince into Singlish. The Leeter Tunku became the first literary classic in Singlish.[9] In 2021, his translations of Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Peter Rabbit and selected Brothers Grimm's Children's and Household Tales were released. His Singlish Winnie-the-Pooh, originally by A. A. Milne, appeared in 2023.
As an editor, Gwee worked on one of two seminal volumes on Singaporean and Malaysian literature in English Sharing Borders: Studies in Contemporary Singaporean-Malaysian Literature, published in 2009. His introduction exposes the problems of ideology that continue to plague the countries' literature in the name of postcolonial studies.
In 2010, Gwee edited the popular fiction collection Telltale: Eleven Stories, which was adopted as a Literature O-Level text. In 2011, his human rights-based anthology Man/Born/Free: Writings on the Human Spirit from Singapore pays tribute to the life of Nelson Mandela and was launched in Cape Town, South Africa. In 2015, he edited the two-volume Singathology: 50 New Works by Celebrated Singaporean Writers, a commemoration of Singapore's golden jubilee.
In 2009, during the AWARE Saga, Gwee wrote an influential Facebook note to advise fellow Christians against supporting covert action.[10] The AWARE saga was an event in Singapore's feminist, human rights, and LGBT history that involved the leadership of Association of Women for Action and Research.[11] In his note, Gwee objected to imposing religious beliefs on a secular organisation and warned against the implications on Christian witness.[12]
In 2014, the National Library Board controversially announced that it was pulping three children's books following a user's complaint that they had LGBT themes that undermined family values. Gwee, with fellow writers Adrian Tan, Prem Anand, and Felix Cheong, cancelled their library event on humour. He further declined to give his keynote speech at a National Schools Literature Festival that weekend.[13] Two books were eventually moved to the adults' section.[14]
In 2014, when Gwee was among the Singapore Literature Prize's English poetry judges, poet Grace Chia, whose collection Cordelia was shortlisted, accused the prize of sexism. Gwee responded by saying, "All entries have an equal chance of consideration for winning, and we discussed it based on that point alone, and on the strengths of the collections."[15] The other poetry judges were prominent female poet Leong Liew Geok and poet Boey Kim Cheng.[16] Gwee, in fact, wrote the preface to Cordelia.
In 2016, Gwee wrote an editorial in The New York Times on the growth of Singlish through the years.[17] It was responded to in a statement by the Press Secretary of the Prime Minister of Singapore and sparked a national debate.[18][19]
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