Merry Christmas in verse: Singapore poets on taxes and the holidays

SINGAPORE – The Straits Times has a tradition of commissioning works from literary writers for Christmas. For 2025, we have asked six poets to give their take on taxes and Christmas, inspired by the year’s headline-grabbing topic of tariffs and trade for the season associated with gift-giving and shopping.

The poets range in genres and ages, from writers who have just debuted their collections to a lauded Cultural Medallion recipient.

Here are their poetic offerings, ST’s gifts to readers in this season of merrymaking.

Anne Lee Tzu Pheng, 79, is a Cultural Medallion recipient and a former associate professor in English Literature at the National University of Singapore. She is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently Common Life: Drawings And Poems (2018).

In 2014, she was on the inaugural list of 108 women inducted into the Singapore Women’s Hall of Fame.

Yong Shu Hoong, 59, has won the Singapore Literature Prize thrice: for Frottage (2005), The Viewing Party (2013) and Anatomy Of A Wave (2022). He is the author of seven poetry collections and a co-author of collaborative works, The Adopted: Stories From Angkor (2015), Lost Bodies: Poems Between Portugal and Home (2016) and Lilla Torg: A Scandinavian Journey (2023). Currently the festival director of Singapore Writers Festival, he teaches part-time in the English department at Nanyang Technological University.

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Marylyn Tan, 32, is the first female poet to win the 2020 Singapore Literature Prize for her 2018 debut collection, Gaze Back. The collection, which she describes as the “lesbo Singaporean trans-genre witch grimoire you never knew you needed”, was shortlisted for the 2019 Lambda Literary Awards. She was a featured writer in the recently concluded Singapore Writers Festival.

READ HER POEM HERE

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Theophilus Kwek, 31, has published five full-length collections of poetry, most recently Commonwealth (2025). His Circle Line (2013) and Giving Ground (2016) were both shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize.

In 2023, he was the youngest writer and the first Singaporean to be awarded the Cikada Prize by the Swedish Institute, given to an East Asian poet for poetry that “defends the inviolability of life”.

READ HIS POEM HERE

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Academic and poet Aaron Maniam, 46, has published two collections of poetry. The first, Morning At Memory’s Border (2005), was shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize.

Today, the former civil servant researches and teaches at the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government.

READ HIS POEM HERE

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Wahid Al Mamun, 28, is a poet whose

debut collection, What God Took Your Legs Away,

was published by Afterimage in 2025. He is working on his PhD in anthropology at McGill University in Canada.

READ HIS POEM HERE

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