INFO
| Name | Chris Tse (he/him) |
| Born | 1982 |
| Country of Birth | Aotearoa |
| Place of Residence | Pōneke Wellington |
| Ethnicities | Chinese (Cantonese) |
| Artform | Literature |
| Decades Active | 2010s, 2020s |
ABOUT
Chris Tse is a poet, writer and editor whose work explores his identity and culture as a queer Chinese person in Aotearoa in playful, emotionally evocative and formally experimental ways. In 2022, Tse was named the 13th New Zealand Poet Laureate.
Born and raised in Te Awakairangi ki Tai Lower Hutt, where his great-grandfather and grandparents owned a fruit shop in Jackson Street, Petone, Tse graduated with a BA in Film and English Literature from Victoria University Wellington (2004) before completing his MA at the International Institute of Modern Letters in 2005. In 2009, he was awarded the NZ Listener / New Zealand Chinese Association Short Story Prize for his piece, ‘At Two Speeds’.
In 2011, Tse was one of three poets to be featured in AUP New Poets 4 (2011). His section, ‘Sing Joe’, featured a series of narrative poems that delved into his childhood and the stories of his great grandparents’ emigration from China to Aotearoa. “Tse’s story remains emphatically personal, emotionally reverberant in its very clipped, tightly-wound expressiveness,” wrote reviewer Nick Ascroft in Landfall at the time.
His debut collection, How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes (2014), reckons with the real-life murder of Cantonese gold miner Joe Kum Yung at the hands of a white supremacist in Wellington in 1905. NZ Poetry Shelf’s Paula Green praised the way the poems “draw upon and draw in notions of distance, defeat, guilt and forgiveness”, with the collection harvesting “shifting forms, voices and tones that promote poetry as mood, state of mind, emotional residue.” The collection was awarded the Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry at the 2016 New Zealand Book Awards.
This collection was followed by the seductive and winking HE’S SO MASC (2018), a holographic pop-cultural snapshot of “self-loathing poets and compulsive liars, of youth and sexual identity, and of the author as character — pop star, actor, hitman, and much more.” In an interview with This NZ Life, Tse reflected, “It was time to see if I could write about myself. There aren’t many gay, male poets published in New Zealand and visibility is important.” Reviewing the collection, NZ Booksellers observed the “variety and interplay of amusing observations and sometimes sad laments. The everyday and the ordinary alongside the extraordinary and the beautifully phrased.”
Super Model Minority (2022) followed: a collection that loosely ties up the trilogy of work and that spills with rage, humour, and tenderness. “It’s the end of the world,” the blurb announces, “and Chris Tse has lost his chill.” Critic and poet Nina Mingya Powles praised the way the collection’s poems “transform and shimmer in full colour, calling back and forth to each other through the book like a pop song’s echoing refrain”, while RNZ’s Harry Ricketts called it “his most ambitious [collection] to date… an eloquent cry of anguish, anger and hope.”
Alongside being a writer, Tse works as an editor, performer, and curator. As an editor, he worked with Emma Barnes on Out Here: An Anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ Writers From Aotearoa (2021), the first major anthology of writing from queer Aotearoa voices, and is the current editor of The Spinoff’s ‘Friday Poem’. Tse has also worked across a number of literary festivals, including being the Curator: Asia for Auckland Writers Festival 2023 and a co-programmer for Verb Festival 2023. As a performer, he is also a founding member of pop-poetry phenomenon Show Ponies and has performed with the collective since its inception in 2019. Beyond this, Tse has garnered attention for his fashion style, which he has described as an extension of his interrogation of self-expression and masculinity in his writing.
As the 13th Poet Laureate of Aotearoa, Tse has been tasked with promoting, writing, and advocating for poetry across the country. He is the first Asian and first openly queer Poet Laureate.
Outside of his creative practice, Tse works in the Office of the Auditor-General, where he has been since 2013.
LINKS
Key works / presentations
2022 — Super Model Minority, Auckland University Press
2021 — Out Here: An Anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ Writers from Aotearoa, Auckland University Press (as a writer and editor)
2018 — HE’S SO MASC, Auckland University Press
2014 — How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes, Auckland University Press
2011 — AUP New Poets 4, Auckland University Press
Key awards
2022–2025 — New Zealand Poet Laureate
2016 — New Zealand Book Awards: Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry (How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes)
