Chen Cuifen

MA Creative Writing

2018 — 2020

Chen Cuifen was born and raised in Singapore where she now lives and works, having spent time abroad in the UK and Australia. Her fiction has been anthologised by Ethos Books/Margaret River Press and Regulus Press, while her poetry has been published in Southeast Asian Review of English and her creative nonfiction in Fourth Genre. Cuifen was the winner of the Troubadour International Poetry Prize 2018 and the Literary Taxidermy Short Story Competition 2019. She loves coffee, liminal spaces and fantastic things.

https://chencuifen.com/

hello@chencuifen.com

Click here to add in Fav

Thesis work

Impermanent Cartographies comprises six short stories that explore transient identities, places and connections. The collection spans a range of countries and settings, subtly displacing its characters in order to interrogate assumptions about home and belonging, question social and cultural norms, and seek a new way of mapping the geography of selfhood. From Singaporeans who stumble across different versions of themselves abroad to those caught at a crossroads in their own country, the protagonists of these stories undergo liminal transitions that culminate in a tension without easy answers.

Published work and readings

Published works
Chen, C. (2018). What My Net Dragged To The Surface. Retrieved from https://www.coffeehousepoetry.org/poems/troubadour-poetry-prize-2018
Chen, C. (2019). Sunshade. Starlight. In Pleasure to Burn: Selected Stories from the 2019 Literary Taxidermy Short Story Competition. USA: Regulus Press.
Chen, C. (2019). Reunion Dinner. In Jon Gresham and Elizabeth Tan (Eds.), In This Desert, There Were Seeds. Singapore: Ethos Books.
Chen, C. (2020). Jennifer. Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring 2020), pp. 145-152. Retrieved from: https://fourthgenre.byu.edu/jennifer-by-cuifen-chen/
Chen, C. (2020). A Place Where Nothing Happened At All. Retrieved from https://loveinthetimeofcovidchronicle.com/2020/10/16/a-place-where-nothing-happened-at-all-chen-cuifen/

Conferences and events
May 2020: Read at LaSaturday: Art School Stories, #BuySingLit.
Jan 2020: Staged short play “Off the Mat” at Three Courses, ARTWALK Little India.
November 2019: Presented “Writing Through The Pink Glass Ceiling” at the Australasian Association of Writing Programs 24th Annual Conference, Sydney, Australia.
November 2019: Spoke at Launch of In This Desert, There Were Seeds, Singapore Writers Festival.
November 2018: Presented “Finding Home From the Outside In: 1 Reading by 5 Singapore Postgraduate Students from 12 Countries” at the Australasian Association of Writing Programs 23rd Annual Conference, Perth, Australia.
November 2018: Read at You Can Learn That In School: Readings from Singapore’s University Creative Writing Programmes, Singapore Writers Festival.
October 2018: Presented “Poeming the Paint, Painting the Poem: Ekphrastic Poetry” at Fourth Graduate Student Conference on Visual Culture, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.