Kwek began writing as a student at Raffles Institution under the mentorship of writers like
Alvin Pang and
Aaron Maniam. He has since published four poetry collections in Singapore and in the UK, namely
They Speak Only Our Mother Tongue (2011),
Circle Line (2013),
Giving Ground (2016) and
The First Five Storms (2017). His work has also appeared in both Singaporean and foreign-based journals, including
The Irish Examiner,
Southword,
The London Magazine, The North, and the
Quarterly Literary Review Singapore (QLRS). His poetry second collection,
Circle Line, was shortlisted for the 2014
Singapore Literature Prize. He went on to win the Martin Starkie Prize in 2014, the Jane Martin Prize in 2015, and the inaugural New Poets’ Prize in 2016. His translation of Wong Yoon Wah's poem "Moving House" won Second Place in the Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry in Translation in 2016. Kwek's poems have been included in the Singapore
A-Level literature syllabus. His long poem, Terezin, was performed at the 2016 Oxford New Writing Festival. The poem was also adapted as a chamber opera by Daniel Bonaventure Lim at the Performing the Jewish Archives project at the University of Leeds. He also wrote the libretto for
This World Lousy, a musical by Peter Shepherd which premiered in Oxford in 2016. Aside from writing poetry, Kwek is also an editor and critic. He served as President of the Oxford University Poetry Society, and is a Co-Editor of Oxford Poetry and Featured Editor of The Oxford Culture Review. He is also a Singapore Editor-at-Large for
Asymptote, a Taiwan-based online literary journal. In 2016, Kwek co-founded The Kindling, an online poetry journal. Theophilus co-edited
Flight, an anthology of poetry in response to the European refugee crisis, published by the Oxford Students’ Oxfam Group. Together with Singapore writers
Joshua Ip and
Tse Hao Guang, Kwek co-edited
UnFree Verse (2017), an anthology of formal poetry in Singapore. Kwek's reviews and essays have appeared in
The London Magazine,
The Lonely Crowd,
The Oxonian Review,
The Oxford Culture Review,
Mackerel, and
QLRS. == Works ==