Robert Yeo was born in Singapore in 1940, and is one of the country’s most representative writers. He has been described as having captured the changing Singaporean psyche through his poetry and plays, documenting the country from its nascent years to its coming-of-age. Yeo is also a founding executive director of OperaViva and has recently focused his writing endeavours on opera as a librettist. In 1991, he received the Pingat Bakti Masyarakat (Public Service Medal) for his contributions to drama in Singapore and in 2011, the SEA Write Award for a lifetime of writing.

Registered at birth as Yeo Cheng Chuan, Robert Yeo grew up as the eldest son with a younger sister and two brothers in a Peranakan Hokkien family. The first language he learnt was Peranakan Malay and he only started learning English when he began his formal education at six.

Yeo attended Serangoon English School from 1947 to 1956 and it was in secondary school that his love for literature was born. He would devour books borrowed from a schoolmate’s large collection, spending his mornings in school and his afternoons and evenings at home reading, sometimes in poor light. Soon, he became a self-described “schoolboy scribbler”, inspired to imitate the writers he admired. The ignition of his interest in poetry came serendipitously one day after school when Yeo noticed that an Indian family was selling their household items in their home just next to his school. Curious, he went in to browse and discovered a pocket book of a Persian poem translated by Edward FitzGerald, Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which would come to reside in Yeo’s shirt pocket and be read over and over again. In school, he took Additional Literature for his O levels, exposing him to great Augustan poets such as Dryden and Pope, as well as the Romantic poets.

Yeo topped his class in the ‘O’ level examinations, and went on to attend St. Andrew’s School for his pre-university education. Yeo’s love for poetry was fostered as he further studied Romantic poetry by Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats in St. Andrew’s School. He also began his discovery of modernist poetry, partially inspired by a schoolmate who would spontaneously recite W. H. Auden poems to him.

Leaving St. Andrew’s School, Yeo went on to the National University of Singapore, eventually graduating with a BA (Hons) in English in 1961. While at the university, his involvement with the theatre began as he served as vice-president of the Literary Society and took part in stage plays. Yeo also published poems in undergraduate magazines. While at the university, he also attended a poetry reading by poets Edwin Thumboo and Ee Tiang Hong, which impressed upon Yeo the potential of writing in Singapore and Malaya.

Yeo returned to St. Andrew’s School as a trainee teacher in 1962, and would continue serving the school as a full-time teacher until 1966. As a teacher, he took up the challenge of introducing the Modern Paper in ‘A’ level Literature and taught difficult books by T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and W. B. Yeats, with the approval and encouragement of Francis Thomas, the school principal. When Yeo published his second book of poems and napalm does not help 11 years later in 1977, he dedicated the collection to Thomas.

In 1966, Yeo received a scholarship from the Public Service Commission and headed to London, UK, to pursue a Masters in Comparative Education. These two years in London were significant to Yeo’s artistic development as it would inspire and colour his artistic beliefs. He joined the Poetry Society of the Institute of Education and served as its President in 1968. In his free time, Yeo would attend plays and poetry readings, taking in as much as he could from what London’s art scene could offer. During this period, he also discovered a new sense of political awareness, encountering for himself student unrest and demonstrations in London and the rest of the world. In 1967, Yeo came upon the next book that would influence his reading of poetry greatly—A. Alvarez’s The New Poetry—and it was to lead him to listen to the American beat poet Allen Ginsberg at the Roundhouse.

After his time in London, Yeo returned to Singapore for a spell and became the editor of Prospect, a magazine published by the Ministry of Education. During this time, he wrote his first play Are You There Singapore?, but it would not reach the stage till six years later. In 1970, he accepted a job in Bangkok, Thailand to serve in the Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Secretariat as an information officer. During this period, his first book of poetry Coming Home Baby was published in 1971 after a few years in the making. In addition to his daily duties as an information officer, he also wrote, using a pseudonym, articles for the Singapore publication The New Nation on his experiences in Bangkok. He returned to Singapore again in 1972 and joined the Teachers’ Training College as a lecturer the following year.

Now settled in Singapore, Yeo put his new perspectives into words and action, staging—together with the president of the Experimental Theatre Club Prem Kumar as director—his first play Are You There Singapore? in 1974. The play, which had a sold-out run at the Drama Centre, was anchored in Singaporean language, characters and situations, and ignited a desire to produce and stage locally written plays and to move away from Western plays. Yeo was also instrumental in getting Indian playwright Asif Currimbhoy’s play Goa staged in Singapore in 1975. He found an artistic kindred spirit in Currimbhoy, whose work and belief that art had constructive value in national and social concerns echoed and inspired Yeo’s own beliefs. Like Are You There Singapore?, the staging of Goa drew attention to the importance of developing plays that drew from post-colonial experiences.

Yeo followed his first play with One Year Back Home in 1980, which caused a controversy with its opposition politician character, Fernandez. This issue was revisited in 1997 in Yeo’s play Changi—the concluding instalment of his Singapore Trilogy of plays—where Fernandez returns to contemplate the still simmering issue of political censorship and detention in Singapore. During this period he also wrote and staged Second Chance (1988) and The Eye of History (1992).

Yeo also continued writing poems, publishing his second book of poetry and napalm does not help (1977), A Part of Three: Poems (1989) and Leaving Home, Mother: Selected Poems (1999). He had published the poetry anthology Five Takes in 1974, consisting of poems by himself, Arthur Yap and three other poets, and also written a novel The Adventures of Holden Heng in 1986.

Living through Singapore’s transition to independence, Yeo is a firm advocate of a national literature that could be identified as Singapore literature. To this aim, he has served in arts advisory committees and compiled and edited anthologies of plays, short stories and poems for both the general reading public and secondary school students. He also was an arts columnist for The New Nation in 1974. This passion also translated to his time as a Literature teacher, where he would champion the teaching of Singapore literature in secondary schools. In 1991, he received the Pingat Bakti Masyarakat (Public Service Medal) for his contributions to drama in Singapore. In 2011, he received the SEA Write Award.

Yeo, who has been associated with second-generation poets such as Chandran Nair, Lee Tzu Pheng and Arthur Yap on account of their reflective, ironic and often satirical takes on life in Singapore, continues to write and teach.

In recent years, Yeo has focused his creative output towards opera as a librettist. He wrote his first libretto Fences in 2006 and followed that with Kannagi, The Story of the Jewelled Anklet in 2009. In 2008, he, together with Singapore Lyric Opera founder Leow Siak Fah and composer John Sharpley founded OperaViva to showcase new works by Singapore and Asian librettists. In 2011, he published a book of memoirs Routes: A Singaporean Memoir 1940­–75, and in 2012, he published his collected poems The Best of Robert Yeo. Yeo is also currently Adjunct Professor in Creative Writing at the Singapore Management University.