The Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize is awarded annually to an unpublished manuscript of original Anglophone poetry by an author of Asian heritage residing anywhere in the world. The winner receives book publication and USD1,500.
This year we’re honored to have Gwee Li Sui to be our judge. Gwee is a poet, an artist, a critic, and a translator. He has eight volumes of verse to date, the latest being Look How We’ve Already Forgotten. He wrote and illustrated Singapore’s first long-form English graphic novel Myth of the Stone back in 1993. A familiar name in Singapore’s cultural scene, Gwee has both written and lectured on a wide range of literary subjects.
Five finalists will be announced in August 2026, and they will be invited to read their work at a finalists’ reading in September 2026, at which the prize winner will be announced. The winning manuscript will be published in Fall 2027 by Gaudy Boy, an imprint of the NYC-based literary nonprofit Singapore Unbound.
Established in 2017, Gaudy Boy publishes poetry, fiction, and literary nonfiction of extraordinary merit by Asian voices. Our name is taken from the poem “Gaudy Turnout” by Singaporean poet Arthur Yap about his time abroad in 1970s Leeds, UK. From the Latin “gaudium,” meaning joy, Gaudy Boy seeks to delight our readers with the various powers of art.
Introducing Xu Xi, the author of Gaudy Boy's upcoming short story collection, Horizon Hong Kong.
Xu Xi 許素細, an Indonesian-Chinese-American from Hong Kong, was writer-in-residence at Arizona State University, City University of Hong Kong, and University of Iowa, and has directed two international MFAs. She held the Jenks Chair in Contemporary Letters at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. In another life, she held management positions at The Asian Wall Street Journal, Federal Express, and Pinkerton’s. A diehard transnational, she now lives between New York and the rest of the world.
She has published sixteen books—five novels, nine prose collections, one memoir, one coauthored textbook—and edited four anthologies of English Hong Kong literature. Her recent titles include Monkey in Residence and Other Speculations (2022), This Fish is Fowl: Essays of Being (2019), Dear Hong Kong: An Elegy for a City (2017), the novel That Man in Our Lives (2016), and the textbook The Art and Craft of Asian Stories (2021).
Pre-order Horizon Hong Kong today - link in bio🔗
Thank you, British Columbia Review (@thebcreview ) and Candace Fertile, for this thoughtful review of HEAVEN HAS EYES in the British Columbia Review. For those looking to get a copy, please check out our purchase links here:
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So proud to have both Eke and Fablemaker in Ms Magazine's (@ms_magazine ) Best Poetry of 2025 and 2026 . A huge honor!
For those looking to get copies of Eke and Fablemaker, please check out our purchase links here:
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✒️CONTEST ALERT!
The 12th SUSPECT Poetry Contest
Deadline: June 30, 2026
Awards: USD300, 200, and 100
No entry fee
The SUSPECT Poetry Contest returns in 2026 with its 12th iteration!
In conjunction with Gaudy Boy’s September 2026 publication of Mark Kyungsoo Bias’s MINOR DESTRUCTIONS (winner of the Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize), SUSPECT calls for poems that use BOTH words “minor” AND “destructions” or their variants in an imaginative fashion, together or separately. We want micro-stories of huge losses and macro-stories of tiny wreckages. We want deconstructed lyrics and lyrical deconstructions. We want the irreparable, except, perhaps, by art.
This year’s SUSPECT Poetry Contest judge is Mark Kyungsoo Bias, the author of the poetry collection Minor Destructions, winner of the 2025 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize and forthcoming in fall 2026. His work has been published in AGNI, New England Review, Gulf Coast, Georgia Review, Cero Magazine, The Adroit Journal, Narrative, The Common, Washington Square Review, and more. He is a recipient of scholarships and awards from Tin House, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Kundiman, and the Academy of American Poets. He holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst where he was a REAL Fellow. He currently lives in Seoul.
No simultaneous submissions, please. Email your submission to Jee at [email protected]. The poem(s) must be pasted into the body of the email, together with a short cover letter giving your name, mailing address (including country of residence), and brief biographical note.
For more information, please visit our website.
Gaudy Boy is proud to announce our upcoming publication, Horizon Hong Kong by Xu Xi.
A young girl obsesses over an orange-haired lady from Chung King Mansion. A massage therapist practices English with a client. A woman appeals to reinstate her American work visa or face deportation. A man reluctantly attends his high school’s thirty-fifth reunion dinner. Monkeys are appointed academic residency at the local university.
In this short story collection, Xu Xi's cast of idiosyncratic local and expatriate characters navigates what it means to love, leave, and return again and again to their home city of Hong Kong.
Horizon Hong Kong is coming to your bookshelves in July 2026.
📚Gaudy Boy will be at NYC's Rainbow Book Fair, the largest LGBTQ+ book event in the US! Come and talk to us and enjoy books about love, home, family, and food. See you on May 9!
March is International Women's Month. What better way to celebrate the wonderful women in your life than gifting them a groundbreaking collection of female voices?
AMANAT's 24 stories, translated into English from Kazakh and Russian, are a survey of women’s writing in the Central Asian country over its thirty years of independence, paying homage to the rich but largely unrecorded oral storytelling tradition of the region. Contemplating nostalgia, politics, and intergenerational history in a time altered by modernity, Amanat acutely traces the uncertainties, struggles, joys, and losses of a corner of the post-Soviet world often unseen and overlooked.
It's sure to be a meaningful addition to any book lover's catalogue. Gift a copy today - link in bio🔗
Gaudy Boy author and AFTERIMAGE managing editor Daryl Yam definitely leads a full life – from working on his fifth book, to university collaborations, to running events for Singapore press AFTERIMAGE. Thanks Daryl, for documenting your extraordinary 35th birthday recently and letting us take a glimpse of your day in sunny Singapore!
In this video series, we showcase the lives of our Gaudy Boy authors and volunteers around the world. Much thanks to our video editor, Eunice Sng (@eu.isnotnice ) for bringing this to life.
We had a lovely time at AWP this year connecting with so many readers, writers, and publishers across the country. Thank you for coming out to meet our Gaudy Boy authors and joining us to celebrate powerful works of fiction and poetry from Asian writers. See you next year! 🎉🥳
Happy International Women's Day♀️
To celebrate this occasion, Gaudy Boy is casting the spotlight on our women authors, who make up 48% of our total publications to date.
THE SWEETEST FRUITS: In this historical novel, three women, Rosa, Alethea, and Setsu, tell the story of their lives with Lafcadio Hearn, a.k.a. Koizumi Yakumo, best known as the globetrotting author of America’s first Creole cookbook and his volumes about the folklore and ghost stories of Meiji-Era Japan.
EKE
A collection of visual aberrations that fumble and stammer, and that concede that a closure in expression can never be achieved, the poems of Eke ache towards both painful and opportune expression.
THE UNREPENTANT
The Unrepentant tells the stories of Malayan insurgents who loved, doubted, grieved, and hungered amid a revolution. A guerilla draws a priest into the cause. A translator debates the language of the revolution. A brother aspires to be Malaysia’s first cosmonaut. An exile returns home.
Learn more about our titles by women writers, which transport you to wondrous and heartrending realms across space and time, on our website.
In this guest post by Gaudy Boy author Jhani Randhawa, Jhani showcases a day in their life in snowy Western Massachusetts, amidst winter strolls, local readings, daily work, and cozy gatherings.
Find Jhani at AWP this week – they will be signing their book at Gaudy Boy's table between 11AM – 12PM. Catch them at Table 718 at Baltimore Convention Center!
Author Bio: Jhani Randhawa is a multidisciplinary teaching artist and independent scholar. Jhani’s debut collection Time Regime (Gaudy Boy, 2022) won the 2023 California Book Award for Poetry, and their writing has appeared most recently in Gulf Coast, diode, Little Mirror, and the hybrid anthology A Mouth Holds Many Things (Fonograf Editions & De-Canon). They are a contributing editor of Jagdeep Raina: Beautiful Zameen (forthcoming from PS Guelph, 2026).
