Chris Tse was born and raised in Lower Hutt. He completed an MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters. Tse was featured in AUP New Poets 4 (2011), and his work has appeared in publications in New Zealand and overseas. His first collection How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes (2014) won the Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry, and his second book HE'S SO MASC was published to critical acclaim in 2018. He is co-editor of Out Here: An Anthology of Takatapui and LGBTQIA+ Writers in Aotearoa.