Late Malaysian pioneer poet Wong Phui Nam’s new and selected poems published by NUS Press

SINGAPORE – Up until the hours before he died at 87 on Sept 26, 2022, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysian poet Wong Phui Nam was fiddling restlessly with two manuscripts, making minute revisions to lines from six decades ago and compiling a collection of new poems he had titled In The Mirror.

The late giant of Malaysian poetry’s new work and his own retrospective of his oeuvre might not have been published, if not for two young writers – Singaporean poet Daryl Lim Wei Jie and Malaysian scholar Brandon K. Liew – who have painstakingly edited In The Mirror: New And Selected Poems Of Wong Phui Nam (2025).