Guiding Voices x Poetry International: Chris Tse

On Saturday, June 14, Poetry International presents a special program in collaboration with Rotterdam literary platform Guiding Voices, featuring poet Chris Tse, the Poet Laureate of New Zealand. During the 55th edition of the Poetry International Festival, he will join interviewer Ernest van der Kwast (NLD-IND) to discuss his work, his engagement, and his role as Poet Laureate. 

Identity and intersectionality are central themes in the work of poet and writer Chris Tse, who has been the Poet Laureate of New Zealand/Aotearoa since 2022. With sharp, multi-layered observations, Tse candidly reflects on the different worlds he navigates as a queer writer of Chinese heritage. Through personal experiences and historical events, he reveals how discrimination and exclusion have painfully shaped history—and how they continue to play out daily in dating apps, literary circles, and pop music. How does poetry help him dream of a future beyond labels, nations, and genres?

Chris Tse

Chris Tse is a poet, editor, and writer, and the current poet laureate of New Zealand (2022-2025). 

Tse studied film and English literature before obtaining an MA in creative writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters. He began writing as a teenager and reports to have been inspired by the previous Poet Laureates of his country. Therefore, he aims to use his platform as current Poet Laureate to move poetry into the mainstream, engaging especially younger people. 

His first poetry collection How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes (2014), which recounts the racially motivated murder of Chinese miner Joe Kum Yung in 1905, won the Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry in 2016. While his own heritage and the Chinese experience in New Zealand are central to much of his work, another aspect of his identity, his queerness, comes to the foreground in his poetry collections HE’S SO MASC (2018) and Super Model Minority (2022), which was a finalist at the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. These more recent publications take the reader through the ups and downs of modern-, urban-, queer- and nightlife. 

Tse’s work has been published in several magazines, such as Landfall, which described his poetry as curious and original. Furthermore, he co-edited Out Here: An Anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ Writers from Aotearoa (2021), the first major anthology comprising poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction by queer Aotearoa writers. Tse was a fellow of the International Writing Program’s Fall Residency at the University of Iowa in 2024 and is a founding member of the poetry collective Show Ponies.