Born in 1963, in the turbulent years between Malaysian and Singaporean independence, writer architect Kasan Goh is a fourth-generation Chinese emigrant from Singapore and a first-generation Singaporean immigrant in the United Kingdom.

His mother, Margaret Joyce Wong Pui Yee, was an editor, secondary school teacher, telemarketer, practice manager, and folk painter. His father, Goh Poh Seng, was a poet, GP, novelist, dramatist, entrepreneur, and cultural pioneer. Kasan is the eldest of four brothers.

At 18, Kasan worked as an intern and researcher on Bu Ye Tian, a privately initiated project led by his father to save the historic Boat Quay area in Singapore from authorities plans for its removal. Credited as the first major conservation and regeneration proposal in Singapore, Bu Ye Tian was successful in raising Singaporeans’ awareness of the cultural significance of their own architectural heritage.

In 1986, his family lost everything and left Singapore for exile in Canada.

Kasan, at the time a student at the Architectural Association, School of Architecture in London, survived the next five years by squatting abandoned properties between Brixton and the North Peckham Estate. He adapted the wen fu prose form of Two Prose Poems from Red Cliff by the Sung Dynasty poet Su Tungpo and wrote short stories to capture and reclaim the memories of home which mattered most to him.

After completing a handful of architectural projects for William Lim Associates in Singapore in the ‘90s, Kasan eventually settled in Gravesend, Kent. He runs an architectural practice in North Kent with his wife and fellow architect, Camilla Prizeman. They have two sons.

Billy, Seetoh and Co, Kasan’s first novel, loosely based on his experience as a young immigrant in London, is inspired by Cao Xueqin’s The Story of the Stone, a classic 18th-century Chinese novel chronicling the young life of Jia Baoyu and the Jia family’s fall from grace.

Diaspura is Kasan’s next work in progress. It is a triptych of novellas on the theme of emigration and death.