Reading Wong's work provides a window into the writer's personal life and angst. Openly gay, Wong has long favoured what he calls 'confessional poetry', talking about his personal experience and difficulties coming out in a traditional Christian Chinese family; his father has not talked to him since he came out 14 years ago, and his mother is in 'self-denial'.

'My family is a psychological mess, but because we're Asians we don't really talk about it,' he says. 'It's all about saving face. I'm the only one spilling everyone's guts through my writing.'

The themes in Wong's writing have developed over the years. In his first two collections of poetry, Squatting Quietly (2000) and The End of His Orbit (2001), the young author mainly dealt with his response to the breakdown of his relationships with family members and the absence of a father figure in his life. But he has grown more philosophical, writing about how the city state has shaped him and expanding beyond issues of sexuality to embrace themes of love, mortality and alienation.

In his last book of poems, Tilting Our Plates to Catch the Light, published in 2007, Wong imagined what it would be like if he and his partner were both HIV positive, transforming the two of them in his writing into two shape-shifting Hindu deities.

Wong attributes his two-year publishing hiatus to a desire to 'take a break' after constantly travelling to literary festivals. He has also started a PhD research scholarship in English literature at the National University of Singapore.

Wong's sense of isolation and alienation remains evident in many of the 16 tales that make up Let Me Tell You Something About That Night. The Sleeping Prince, for example, tells the story of an elf who falls in love with a prince, who in turn is in love with a fisherman's daughter. To capture the prince's attention, the elf kills the young woman and, with the help of a witch, takes over the victim's body, living the rest of his life as a woman to land his prince.

'These tales stem from a deep-rooted ambivalence I have about love, about life, about what it means to live a meaningful life. Sometimes, I think there is no such thing as a meaningful life,' Wong says.

'For me the contrast between that and the fairy tales was too delicious to give up, because fairy tales are always sexist, homophobic and with a happy ending, and I wanted to subvert the moral of happy endings.'

Early in his career, Wong ran afoul of Singapore's censors: they threatened to pull National Arts Council funding from his second volume owing to its homosexual content, but he went on to win the Singapore Literary Prize for Unmarked Treasure, which he felt helped vindicate his work and was sweet 'revenge' against all those who told him he would not succeed because of the themes he explored.

'It's not just about being gay; it is also about talking about oneself. Asians don't talk about themselves, about how their father doesn't love them anymore - well, unless you're Asian-American and then you can write anything. The younger generation of readers is fine with that, but the older generation feels uncomfortable,' he says.

'Confessional poetry is very much frowned upon by all the serious literary people here. They believe poetry has to say something about Singapore, talk about the process of national-identity formation, celebrate the names of neighbourhoods. It's very much a kind of social poetry, which is encouraged by publishers,' he says.

Wong is now working on a new book of poems about dreams, titled Oneiros, which will be published next month.