Ken Mizusawa is a Lecturer in the English Language and Literature Department at the National Institute of Education (NIE), an institute of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is a teacher educator, education researcher, textbook author, educational consultant, and a playwright represented by Playmarket, New Zealand. His dramatic works are regularly licensed for school productions in New Zealand and Singapore and have appeared in Singapore Short + Sweet, a ten-minute play festival in 2008 and 2009. In Singapore, Ken was an external consultant on the Ministry of Education’s Literature in English Teaching Syllabus 2019 and an external consultant for Doyobi, an educational startup.
Ken’s play anthology, The Boy Who Caused 9/11 and Other Plays (2013), was published by Red Wheelbarrow Books and includes two works that were Highly Commended (That Time. That Place. and Touched with Fire) and one that was shortlisted (Free Fall) for Playmarket’s Plays for the Young Competition 2009. His full-length play, Why Do We Do What We Do?, was shortlisted for the Adam NZ Play Award 2015, while two recent works, Pieces of Her and Beware the Wolf were shortlisted for the Plays for the Young Competition 2023.
Ken has also published a series of educational titles with Star Publishing, two of which were Finalists for Best Education Title in the Singapore Book Publishers Association (SBPA) Book Awards 2019. He has co-authored the two-volume textbook series, Integrating Language and Literature (2016), and authored the textbook, Mastering Visual Literacy (2018). He is the editor of Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed: An Anthology of Singapore Plays (2018) and the soon to be released Around the Corner: Stories from the Around the World (2026). The former is an official lower secondary prescribed drama text for the Singapore Literature curriculum that has been adopted for use by over fifty percent of secondary schools. The latter is an international short story collection that will be an upper secondary prescribed prose text for Singapore’s national examinations in Literature beginning in 2028.