Reading: Marylyn Tan

In 2020, Marylyn Tan’s debut volume shocked Singapore’s literary world by winning the country’s premier English-language poetry prize, making its then 27-year-old author the first woman to ever win the award. Moreover, it is not a polite book. It is an instruction book, a grimoire, a call to insurrection to wrest power back from the social structures that serve to restrict, control, and distribute it among those few privileged above the disenfranchised. Whether through occult practices or coding, curses or lyric expression, word and image, these poems make a poetic call to arms.

Queer, female, and Chinese, Tan is a linguistics graduate, poet, and artist who has been performing and disappointing since 2014. Her work trades in the conventionally vulgar, radically pleasurable, and unsanctioned, striving to emancipate and restore the alienated, endangered body. Tan is the poetry reader for Singapore Unbound, founder of multidisciplinary arts collectiveDIS/CONTENT (hellodiscontent.carrd.com), and can be found in her habitat at instagr.am/marylyn.orificial or facebook.com/mrylyn. She lives in Singapore.

This event is co-sponsored by UGA Press, The Georgia Review and the Willson Center for the Arts & Humanities.