Ruth Kiew

Ruth Kiew ( 14 April 1946 – 20 November 2025) was a Malaysian-British botanist focused on Peninsular Malaysia and Borneo. The standard author abbreviation Kiew is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name.

Early life and education Ruth Evans was born in Cambridge on 14 April 1946, the daughter of two botanists both involved with Cambridge University, Jessie Margaret (nee Hadfield) Evans and Clifford Evans. Cambridge was the last British university to permit women to get a standard graduation, which occurred two years after Ruth Evans's birth, and it had inhibited her mother's (J. M. Evans) academic advancement. Consequently J. M. Evans, who became a biology teacher, was determined that her daughter should get the same opportunities that were open to male students. Ruth Evans took an undergraduate degree in psychology, which she later found to be "completely unscientific", before getting postgraduate qualifications in botany, and advancing to a doctorate in tropical plant taxonomy in 1972 under supervisor E. J. H. Corner, found only in two small areas of Peninsular Malaysia's mountainous forests. This was one of five Ridleyandra species identified by Kiew. When later in 2002 she was awarded the David Fairchild medal by the National Tropical Botanical Garden, the equivalent of Nobel Prize in botany,

Personal life and death Soon after arriving in Malaysia in 1969, she met her future husband, Kiew Bong Heang, a zoologist. They later divorced but she retained Kiew as her surname. She was the mother of a son and daughter, She died of cancer on 20 November 2025 in Kuala Lumpur, at the age of 79.

Publications The State of Nature Conservation in Malaysia (1991) Wild Plants of Ha Long Bay [Thực Vật Tự Nhiên ở Vịnh Hạ Long] (2000) Singapore Botanic Gardens : A Souvenir Guide (2001) Begonias of Peninsular Malaysia (2005) A Guide to Begonias in Borneo (2015) Batu Caves: Malaysia's Majestic Limestone Icon (2020) Flowers of Fraser’s Hill, Peninsular Malaysia (2025)