Goh Poh Seng, Singaporean dramatist, novelist, doctor and poet, was born in Kuala Lumpur, British Malaya in 1936. He was educated at Victoria Institution in Kuala Lumpur, received his medical degree from University College Dublin, and practised medicine in Singapore for twenty-five years.
Writing career
His writing blossomed in Ireland, where he met writers Patrick Kavanagh and Brendan Behan, published his poetry in the university magazine, and took a year off school to write. In his time living in Singapore, Dr. Goh held many honorary positions including the Chairman of the NationalTheatre Trust Board between 1967 and 1972, and Vice-Chairman of the Arts Council from 1967 to 1973. He was committed to the development of Art and cultural policies of post-independent Singapore, as well as the development of cultural institutions such as the Singapore National Symphony, the Chinese Orchestra and the Singapore Dance Company. Goh also opened Singapore's first theatre disco lounge, Rainbow Lounge at Ming Arcade, and Bistro Toulouse-Lautrec at Tanglin Shopping Centre for live jazz and poetry readings, organised Singapore's first David Bowie concert in 1983, and envisioned a livelier Singapore River in the 1970s, a proposal that was only taken seriously decades later. He was a founder of the literary magazine Tumasek and co-founded Singapore's first multi-disciplinary arts centre, Centre 65, to promote the arts. Centre 65 inspired the name of Centre 42, an institution for playwriting which opened in 2014.
Novels
Goh's first novel, If We Dream Too Long won the National Book Development Council of Singapore's Fiction Award in 1976 and has been translated into Russian, Japanese and Tagalog. While the novel was criticised by The Straits Times upon publication, it enjoyed a first print run of 3,000 copies, is considered the first English-language Singaporean novel, and has been used as a Literature text in various universities. His other books include the novels The Immolation and A Dance of Moths, which received the NBDCS Fiction award in 1996, and poetry collectionsEyewitness, Lines from Batu Ferringhi and Bird With One Wing. Goh's play When the Smiles are Done was the first to use Singlish on stage, while his debut play The Moon is Less Bright was revived by Theatreworks in 1990 and The Second Breakfast Company in 2018. In 1982, Goh received the Cultural Medallion for his contributions to Literature.
Goh emigrated to Canada in 1986. In 2007, Goh returned to Singapore for the last time to attend the Singapore Writers Festival. A 15-minute documentary about Goh, directed by Almerinda Travasoss, was released in the same year. In 2009, Goh announced his plan to write a quartet of novels loosely based on his personal and family history. He died on 10 January 2010 in Vancouver, after suffering from Parkinson's disease in his later years. Paying tribute to Goh, playwright Robert Yeo said, "He is someone who not only believed in literature, but also believed in lifting the cultural aspirations of Singaporeans."
Posthumously
In 2012, his son Kagan Goh published Who Let In The Sky?, a family memoir about Goh's struggle with Parkinson's. In 2014, the Centre for Southeast Asia Research at the University of British Columbia acquired the Goh Poh Seng Collection, a set of 110 volumes from Goh's library. In 2015, If We Dream Too Long was selected by The Business Times as one of the Top 10 English Singapore books from 1965–2015, alongside titles by Arthur Yap and Daren Shiau. His play, When Smiles Are Done, was also selected as one of the "finest plays in 50 years" with productions by Michael Chiang, Kuo Pao Kun and Alfian Sa'at. In the same year, The Straits Times' Akshita Nanda selected If We Dream Too Long as one of 10 classic Singapore novels. "Widely considered the first true Singaporean novel," she wrote, "it should be enjoyed for the lightness of its prose and the wit and insight of the author. Later in 2015, a collection of Goh's short stories based on his adventures in 1950s Ireland, Tall Tales and MisAdventures of a Young Westernized Oriental Gentleman, was posthumously published by NUS Press. The memoir, written in the last years of Goh's life, includes reflections of his formative encounters with Irish literary giants Patrick Kavanagh and Samuel Beckett. Reviewing the book in Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Zhang Ruihe called it "a valuable addition to Singapore literature, a record of a writer's coming of age in a time of global transition and revolution." In 2016, If We Dream Too Long was adapted into an interactive dinner theater event by pop-up events company AndSoForth and the National Arts Council.
