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Moving House book cover
Moving House
2020
First Published
3.93
Average Rating
97
Number of Pages

Theophilus Kwek’s first UK collection is concerned with the individual and the collective stories that become history. The poems set out from formative moments in the poet’s memory, to pivotal moments in the colonial past of Southeast Asia, and finally the political upheavals of the present. Hospitality, precarity, migration – these are some of the themes that recur as the poet makes his own journey from Singapore to Europe and back again. Moving House moves on a big time and space map, from Icelandic tales to the Malayan Emergency, and more contemporary dramas. From the perspective of a Chinese Singaporean shaped by the collective traditions and histories described in this book, writing in Britain, the poems model a sense of openness on the space of the page.

Avg Rating
3.93
Number of Ratings
27
5 STARS
22%
4 STARS
56%
3 STARS
15%
2 STARS
7%
1 STARS
0%
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Author

Theophilus Kwek
Author · 4 books
Theophilus Kwek has published three poetry collections, Giving Ground (2016), They Speak Only Our Mother Tongue (2011) and Circle Line (2013), which was shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize. He is a winner of the Jane Martin Prize and the Martin Starkie Prize, and his poems have appeared in The London Magazine, The Interpreter’s House, the Quarterly Literary Review of Singapore, and various anthologies. He studies History and Politics at Merton College, Oxford, and is currently President of the Oxford University Poetry Society, as well as Content Advisor to the Oxford Culture Review.
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