Koh Buck Song

Koh Buck Song's books as author and editor include six books of poetry and haiga, literary anthologies, books on aspects of Singapore ranging from urban development to foreign investment promotion, the first book on Singapore's country brand, Brand Singapore (2011, translated into Chinese and published in China in 2012, with a third edition in 2021), and a travelogue with a place branding theme, Around The World In 68 Days: Observations Of Life From A Journey Across 13 Countries (2021). 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 Sunday Review, a weekly world affairs section. His regular personal opinion column, Monday With Koh Buck Song, ran for almost a decade. 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.

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.

He was the English section Editor, and then 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 University (UK) and Manila, and in poetry readings at Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the USA. As a haiga artist with several exhibitions in Singapore and Laos, his art builds on earlier work exploring the synergy between poetry and painting, especially in collaborations with the abstract artist Thomas Yeo and the watercolourist Ong Kim Seng. He is the National Gallery Singapore's poet-in-residence 2021-22, the Gallery's third after Edwin Thumboo and Madeleine Lee.

Koh Buck Song (Chinese: 许木松; born 1963) is a Singaporean writer and poet. He is the author and editor of more than 30 books, including six books of poetry and haiga art. 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.