Conan Tan is a Singaporean Chinese writer based between London and Singapore. Currently, he is an undergraduate reading Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of Oxford. 

His writing has received numerous honours including the 2024 Martin Starkie Prize and First Place in Singapore’s 2022 National Poetry Competition. Most recently, he was a finalist in the 2024 Oxford Poetry Prize. He has received support from Sing Lit Station, Poetry Translation Centre UK, Barbican Centre as a 2025 Barbican Young Poet, and the Transylvania County Library Foundation. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Pleiades, The Journal, Salt Hill, Cincinnati Review, Passages North, Rattle, and elsewhere. 

“I’m trying to transparent / my shame into something beautiful. A depression / worthy of the Louvre. Vermeer deconstructed light / down to its photons and I can’t even / look the mirror in the eye.”

— first published in Salt Hill

“The morning after it happens, your mother / reschedules your death. Generous woman / that she is, offering you second bones / and new soil.”

— first published in Oxford Poetry