Prof. Wong Yoon Wah is a veteran writer, contemporary poet, scholar and critic of international standing and with an international following. A former Head of Department of Chinese Studies at the National University of Singapore, he has published over 20 books and over 50 articles on classical and modern Chinese literature, comparative literature and postcolonial Chinese literature. He was the recipient of the Cultural Medallion Award for Literature in 1986.

Born in 1941 and brought up in Malaysia, Wong grew up amongst rubber plantations against the tumultuous background of the Malayan Emergency. This was an often horrific experience that he could not talk about for many years but which was clearly a formative period of time, and has remained a source of inspiration for his literary output. Caught between Communist guerrillas of the Malayan National Liberation Army and punitive British forces, he spent much of his unforgettable childhood in a “new village”—in practice a barbed-wire compound which, for all its electricity and running water, was basically a concentration camp whose inhabitants lived under the permanent scrutiny of British guards.

Later on, he would move to Taiwan to study English literature at Taiwan's National Chengchi University, graduating with a BA in 1966. He then went to the USA where he pursued his Ph.D in Chinese Literature at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. In 1972, he moved to Singapore with his wife, fellow writer Lew Poo Chan, to teach in Nanyang University and later became the head of the Department of Chinese Studies at the National University of Singapore.

Over the years, he would spend his time at various universities in China and North America as a visiting scholar. And in 2002, he was appointed the Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Taiwan's Yuan Ze University, where he currently serves as the university’s Faculty Professor of Chinese Language and Literature and Director of International Language and Culture Centre.

Prolific on many fronts, Wong has published over twenty collections of prose and poetry, including Beyond Symbols (1984), Poems of Water and Mountains (1988), and Tropical Forrest and the British Colony (1999). His numerous academic and critical studies on Chinese and comparative literature (in Chinese or English) include Ss'u-k'ung T'u: A Poet-Critic of the Tang, Essays on Chinese Literature: A Comparative Approach, and Yu Dafu: Sources for the Study of His Last Days in Singapore and Sumatra. His work has been widely anthologized in Asia.

For many years the editor of Singa: Literature and the Arts in Singapore, and the Singapore editor of the Anthology of ASEAN literatures, he also served as a member of the National Arts Council’s Arts Advisory Panel and as president of the Singapore Writers Association.

For his commitment to promoting literature regionally, his many distinctions include The Epoch Poetry Award (1974); The China Times Literary Award (1981); the Southeast Asia Write Award (1984); and the ASEAN Cultural Award (1993). In 1986, Wong received the Cultural Medallion for his contributions to literature in Singapore.

Currently, besides spending his time at Yuan Ze University, Wong also serves as vice-president of Southern College in Malaysia.