Yeo is a retired lecturer of the
National Institute of Education and
Nanyang Technological University. In 2011, he is a teacher of creative writing at the
Singapore Management University and mentors the Mentor Access Programme of the
National Arts Council. In 1978, he attended the
University of Iowa's
International Writing Program and was a
Fulbright Scholar in 1995. For more than a decade, from 1977 onwards, he was chairman of the Drama Advisory Committee which helped develop theatre in Singapore, especially English-language theatre. For this work, he received the
Bintang Bakti Masyarakat (Public Service Star) in 1991, and was awarded the
S.E.A. Write Award in 2011. He has published four poetry collections:
Coming Home Baby (1971);
And Napalm Does Not Help (1977),
A Part of Three (1989) and
Leaving Home, Mother (1999) and has been included in several anthologies, including
Five Takes (1974). His venture into novel writing resulted in a sole book:
The Adventures of Holden Heng (1986) about the sexual education of its anti-hero. Yeo has written six plays:
Are You There, Singapore? (1974),
One Year Back Home (1980),
Second Chance (1988),
The Eye of History (1991),
Changi (1996) and
Your Bed is Your Coffin. All the plays except the last have been staged in Singapore.
Are You There, Singapore?,
One Year Back Home and
Changi are collectively known as "the Singapore trilogy".
The Singapore Trilogy was staged as a single adaptation by The Second Breakfast Company in 2021. The work included revisions and new writing done in consultation with Yeo. Yeo has also edited collections of short fiction, plays and textbooks, a memoir, as well as the libretto for an opera,
Fences (2012). ==Works==