Yeng Pway Ngon

Yeng's parents married during the Japanese Occupation (1942–1945).

Yeng Pway Ngon (26 January 194710 January 2021) was a Singaporean poet, novelist and critic in the Chinese literary scene in Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

A prolific writer, Yeng's works have been translated into English, Malay, Dutch and Italian.

Yeng has been a recipient of the Singapore Book Award, the Singapore Literature Prize (four times), and the Southeast Asian Writers Award (also known as the S.E.A. Write Award).

Yeng was born in the Bugis area of Singapore in 1947.

His father was a Chinese physician who came from China and his mother worked in a coffee shop in the area.

Yeng graduated from Ngee Ann College with a Bachelor of Arts in Chinese Literature in 1969.

As a student, Yeng excelled in Chinese and art classes at Catholic High School, Singapore, but scraped through or failed everything else.

He decided to embark on writing after submitting a sonnet in lieu of an essay on any subject in Chinese class.

His teacher gave him a good grade, and the poem was published in a newspaper.

In 1977, one of Yeng's friends falsely implicated him as being a communist.

Yeng was detained under the Internal Security Act for alleged leftist sympathies.

He spent most of those four months alone in prison, with his wife visiting him when she could.

From 1978 to 1983, Yeng worked as a newspaper columnist for Nanyang Siang Pau writing for the column "Chang Hua Duan Shuo".

Yeng became a full-time writer in the 1980s.

He also wrote radio plays for Rediffusion and published many of his works.

In 1983, Nanyang Siang Pau merged with Sin Chew Jit Poh to become Lianhe Zaobao.

Yeng continued contributing as a columnist for the newspaper's "Ren Zai Jiang Hu" column.

In 1987, he published a novel, Yi Ge Xiang Wo Zhe Yang De Nan Ren (A Man Like Me), which won the National Book Development Council of Singapore Book Award the following year.

In 1994, Yeng spent a year in Hong Kong as a freelance columnist for United Daily News, Ming Pao, Sing Tao Daily and Sing Tao Evening News.

In 1995, he set up one of Singapore's most prominent Chinese bookstores, the Grassroots Bookroom, at Textile Centre.

This was his second bookstore, after Vanguard Bookshop at Golden Mile Tower.

For his contributions to the literary scene, Yeng was awarded the Cultural Medallion for Literature in 2003.

Tan had accused Yeng of libelling him in a 2005 letter which the latter had sent to The Straits Times and the National Arts Council.

Yeng was married to Goh Beng Choo, a translator and former journalist.

They met in a bookstore, when Madam Goh was just a 16-year-old secondary school student and Yeng a poet and writer at Ngee Ann College (now Ngee Ann Polytechnic).

The couple have one daughter, who is a freelance piano teacher.

Yeng was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2007, which later spread to his colon and pancreas.

He died on 10 January 2021.

Novels

Novels in translation

In 2012, Yeng was ordered to pay $10,000 in damages and $20,000 in costs to artist Tan Swie Hian.

In 2013, Yeng was the first writer-in-residence of the Nanyang Technological University Chinese department.

He taught classes on Chinese literature and novel-writing and also started to devote more time to a novel about the lives of Cantonese opera actors.

He returned to Singapore later that year and reopened Grassroots Book Room until 2014.

In July 2014, Yeng sold Grassroots to his former customers—former Lianhe Zaobao journalist and dramatist Lim Jen Erh, Lim Yeong Shin and medical doctor Lim Wooi Tee—who reopened the bookstore at Bukit Pasoh Road in January 2015.

In 2014, two English translations of his novels were published in Singapore.

Math Paper Press brought out Art Studio, translated by Goh Beng Choo and Loh Guan Liang, while Epigram Books released Trivialities About Me and Myself, translated by Howard Goldblatt.

In 2015, The Straits Times' Akshita Nanda selected Art Studio as one of 10 classic Singapore novels.

Reading it in its English translation, she called it "beautifully broad-minded in its attitude towards women's rights and inter- racial relations, nicely detailing some characters' slow awakening to the lessons one can learn in art and life outside a narrow circle."