Conan Tan

Photo Credits: Ray Roberts

About Me

Conan Tan is a Singaporean Chinese writer based between the UK 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. Their poems have been published or are forthcoming in Salt Hill, The Cincinnati Review, Passages North, West Trade Review, Rattle, and elsewhere. He is a 2025 Barbican Young Poet and in the 2024/25 Poetry Translation Centre x UNDERTOW cohort. A member of the writing collective zer0sleep, he is working on his debut poetry collection, which was selected for the 2023 Poetry Manuscript Bootcamp. 

Heart Attack

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

"So I’ll replay / the lost reel in my head, forgetting, if only for / a second, about the real loss ten years is still sore / from carrying”


— first published in Rattle

Parable of the Gay Son

A boy must find the joint and press / until it pops, not like a balloon, but like / mushroom spores igniting a deep breath.


— first published in The Penn Review

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