TOP PHOTO: The Star.
WONG Phui Nam, one of the revered Malaysian literary pioneers who helped to shape the local English language writing scene and elevate the art of poetry in South-East Asia, died last night in Kuala Lumpur. He was 87.
The news was confirmed by fellow poet-author Malachi Edwin Vethamani.
Born in 1935 in Kuala Lumpur, Wong received his early education at the Batu Road School and later at the Victoria Institution. In the 1960s, he went on to study economics at the University of Malaya in Singapore (now National University of Singapore), and worked mainly in development finance and merchant banking after graduation.
In his early years, Wong found a balance between his economics studies and his aspiring writer’s dreams. He was active in the literary and poetry scene, playing a role in The New Cauldron, a literary magazine founded by students of Raffles College in Singapore.
During that period, he was also co-editor of Litmus One and 30 Poems, both anthologies of university verse.
Wong’s poems produced during the 1960s first appeared in Bunga Emas, an anthology of Malayan writing published in Britain in 1964. These poems were subsequently put together in book form and published as How the Hills Are Distant in 1968.
“Poetry gives you the capacity to examine yourself, a self-reflection of sorts. I think it’s important that people don’t go through life blindly,” said Wong in an interview with The Star in September, 2019.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, Wong remained relatively inactive in terms of new published works.
Nevertheless, his published volumes of poetry and many of his poems were used in academic texts. In 1988, all his poetry was translated into French and published by the Université de Lille-III.
His second volume Remembering Grandma and Other Rumours was released in 1989.
In the early 2000s, Maya Press in Kuala Lumpur published his collected works titled An Acre of Day’s Glass.
A sonnet sequence, The Hidden Papyrus of Hen-taui was published by Ethos Books in Singapore in 2013, but Wong revisited those works and added more material to the book in 2019.
The Hidden Papyrus of Hen-taui was re-released by Blublack Productions in 2019, featuring 53 sonnets dealing with the search for spiritual freedom amidst religious bigotry.
On the theatre stage, Wong had written two plays – Anike and Aduni – in the early 2000s.
Anike was a Malaysian version of the Greek tragedy Antigone, written by Sophocles. Originally a play about the fates of the human race in the hands of the gods, Wong provided an interesting parallel between the world of Sophocles’ Antigone and Malaysian society.
Original source: https://www.thestar.com.my/lifestyle/culture/2022/09/27/malaysian-literary-pioneer-wong-phui-nam-has-died-aged-87
