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. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Pleiades, Salt Hill, Cincinnati Review, Passages North, Nashville Review, Rattle, and elsewhere. He is a 2025 Barbican Young Poet and a member of the 2024/25 Poetry Translation Centre x Sing Lit Station cohort. He is working on a debut poetry collection, which was selected for the 2023 Poetry Manuscript Bootcamp. 

“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