Marylyn Tan is a queer, female, Chinese Singaporean, linguistics graduate, writer, performer and artist. Her first volume of poetry, GAZE BACK, is the lesbo Singaporean trans-genre witch grimoire you never knew you needed. GAZE BACK was shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Awards in 2019 and made Marylyn the first woman in history to win the Singapore Literature Prize for poetry in 2020, the nation’s most prestigious and longest-running literary award. Marylyn is based in Singapore.
Using the profane, occult and pleasurable to reclaim power and emancipate the endangered body, her work addresses alienation and marginalisation, through trading in the conventionally obscene, unapologetically queer and radically pleasurable, often drawing from themes of the occult and esoteric.
GAZE BACK has been published by Ethos Books in Singapore (2018), with North American rights acquired by The Georgia Review (2022). She has also co-edited an anthology of boundary- and form-pushing verse, New Singapore Poetries (2022), published by Gaudy Boy Press. Outside of full-length poetry titles, Marylyn’s fiction and poetry has been published in several anthologies, such as State of Play: Poets of East & Southeast Asian Heritage in Conversation (2023), Divining Dante (2021) and In This Desert, There Were Seeds (2019). Her web features include essays, reviews and poetry, such as ‘Leav Rupi alone: eXXXtreme #instapoetry’ (2019), published in Jacket2, and ‘Pleasure in the ungovernable’ (2021), a film essay for the Asian Film Archive: Reframe series.
A performer and spoken word artist, Marylyn has also been a guest at numerous festivals and shows, regionally and internationally, such as Jakarta Content Week, Singapore Writers Festival and the Internationales Literatur Festival Berlin.
She can be found on Instagram, the website formerly known as Twitter, and here@marylyntan(dot)com.
Sub to her horrid little blog posts HERE.
Send anonymous admonitions and adulations here.
‘I like my adulations public and my humiliations private.’ – Marylyn Tan, 2024
Photo credit: Ad Maulod
marylyn tan 