[2] In 2016, Boey joined the Nanyang Technological University, where he was associate professor at the School of Humanities, but stepped down as Head of its English department in 2020.

He was sponsored by the United States Information Agency to attend the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

[citation needed] Disillusioned with the state of literary and cultural politics in Singapore, Boey left for Sydney with his wife in 1997 and became an Australian citizen.

In 1987, while studying as an undergraduate, Boey won the first and second prizes at the National University of Singapore Poetry Writing/Creative Prose Competition.

In 1995, Days Of No Name, which was inspired by the people whom he met in the United States, was awarded a merit at the Singapore Literature Prize.

[12] Angelia Poon argues that Boey's poems have "wrestled with the idea of travel as an inevitable part of poetic being and negotiated the multiple meanings of place as geographical location, private memory, personal association, and past fragment".

[13] Besides travel, family plays a large part in Boey's poems–in particular, the figures of his deceased father and grandmother.

[18] In October 2017, Boey's first novel, Gull Between Heaven and Earth, a fictionalised biography of Chinese poet Du Fu, was published by Epigram Books.