Arthur Yap
| Arthur Yap (叶纬雄) | |
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| Born | Arthur Yap Chior Hiong 1943 |
| Died | June 19, 2006 (aged 63) |
| Occupation | Poet, Pedagogue |
| Nationality | Singapore |
| Notable awards |
1976: Poetry award by the National Book Development Council of Singapore 1983:Cultural Medallion for Literature South-East Asian Write Award, Bangkok |
Arthur Yap Chioh Hiong (simplified Chinese: 叶纬雄; traditional Chinese: 葉緯雄; pinyin: Yè Wěi Xióng; 1943 – 19 June 2006) was a Singaporean poet, writer and painter.
Arthur Yap was born in Singapore, the sixth child of a carpenter and a housewife. Yap attended St Andrew's School and the University of Singapore, after which he won a British Council scholarship to study at the University of Leeds in England. At Leeds Arthur earned a master's degree in Linguistics and English Language Teaching, later obtaining his PhD from the National University of Singapore in the years after he returned from Leeds. He stayed on in the University's Department of English Language and Literature as a lecturer between the years 1979 and 1998. Between 1992 and 1996, Yap served as a mentor with the Creative Arts Programme run by the Ministry of Education to help inspire students and nurture young writers at local secondary schools and junior colleges. Yap was then diagnosed with lung cancer, and received radiotherapy treatment. Yap was known to be an intensely private man.
Yap’s poetry is distinctive for an unusual linguistic playfulness and subtlety that is able to bridge the rhythms of Singlish with the precision of acrolectic English. Unsurprisingly, the craft of Yap’s voice has the admiration of other writers. Anthony Burgess has written that he encountered Down the Line "with elation and occasional awe", while D. J. Enright has praised Yap’s "sophisticated cosmopolitan intelligence". The Oxford Companion to 20th-Century Poetry describes Yap’s poems as "original, but... demanding: elliptical, dense, dry, sometimes droll. At their best, they shuttle between playfulness and sobriety and are alert to the rhythms and contours of the natural and the peopled landscape, seasoning insight with compassion."
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