Biography of Kee Thuan Chye

Kee Thuan Chye has been wearing many hats in his life - as an actor, playwright, stage director, journalist. His acting credits over the last 30 years include speaking roles in the films "Entrapment" and "Anna and the King". Other international productions he has acted in include the Hallmark TV-movie "Marco Polo" and "Secrets of the Forbidden City" for the BBC and the History Channel. He will be seen next in the film "Sell Out!", directed by award-winner Yeo Joon Han. On stage, he has acted in countless productions but the one role he is proudest of is that of Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman". As a playwright, he is best known for "1984 Here and Now" and "We Could **** You, Mr Birch". Both performed to full houses when they premiered. "1984 Here and Now" is included in the international anthology "Postcolonial Plays" edited by Helen Gilbert and published by Routledge UK. "We Could **** You, Mr Birch" has been a text studied in Malaysian universities since the mid-1990s. Another play, "The Big Purge", was featured in "Typhoon 4", a playreading festival in London held in May 2005. His new play, "The Swordfish, Then the Concubine", was among the top 5 in the International Playwriting Festival 2006, organised by the Warehouse Theatre in the UK. Excerpts from it were performed at the festival. Kee has also written numerous radio plays many of which were broadcast on RTM in the 1970s. He has also directed about a dozen plays for the theatre. He is the author of "Just In So Many Words" (a collection of his writings in the press) and "Old Doctors Never Fade Away" (a biography). His poems have been published in numerous anthologies and journals at home and abroad. An extract from his novel in progress "A Sense of Home" is included in the anthology "New Writing 10", published in the UK by Picador (2001). Another extract has appeared in "The Merlion and the Hibiscus", published by Penguin India (2002). He has been a judge and regional chairperson of the prestigious Commonwealth Writers Prize. He was on the panel in 1997 and 1998 when the final judging was done in London and Jamaica respectively. In 1998, he was invited as a guest writer to the Melbourne Writers Festival, the Brisbane Writers Festival, and Spring Writing in Sydney. In 2001, he was invited to the inaugural Standard Chartered International Literary Festival in Hong Kong. It is as a journalist that he makes a decent living. He worked at the New Straits Times for 21 years and is currently Associate Editor of The Star.