Koh Buck Song


Koh Buck Song is the author and editor of more than 30 books. He works as a writer, editor and consultant in branding, communications strategy and corporate social responsibility in Singapore. He has held several exhibitions as a Singaporean pioneer of haiga art, developed from a 16th-century Japanese art form combining ink sketches with haiku poems.

Literary & brand consulting career

Koh Buck Song's books as author and editor include three collections of poetry, several anthologies and the first book on Singapore's country brand, Brand Singapore.
He was with The Straits Times from 1988 to 1999, where he was literary editor, political supervisor and chief Parliament commentator, arts and features supervisor, and Assistant Editor of a weekly world affairs section. His regular personal opinion column, Monday With Koh Buck Song, ran for almost 10 years. From 2003 to 2004, he was a contributing columnist on current affairs based in the USA for the Singapore newspaper Today. From 2004 to 2005, he was a regular columnist on leadership for The Straits Times.
He was General Editor of the multilingual literary and arts journal Singa in the 1990s. In 1992, he was poet-in-residence at the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh under the Singapore-Scotland Cultural Exchange programme. He has represented Singapore at literary conferences including at Cambridge and Manila, and in poetry readings at Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the USA. He has spoken extensively on brand Singapore overseas, including as keynote speaker at a City Nation Place global conference in London; at a Pacific Economic Cooperation Council seminar in Tahiti; at the Japan Foundation in Tokyo as a cultural leader of Singapore; and the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University.
His public service has included being Deputy Chairman of the Censorship Review Committee 2009–10, and also a member of the Censorship Review Committees of 1991–92 and 2002–03, the only person to have served on all three panels.

Selected ''haiga'' art exhibitions & talks