Angeline Yap (b. 1959)
BIOGRAPHY
Award-winning writer Angeline Yap is also a busy wife, grandmother and teacher. She has three children and two grandchildren. For most of her life, she has lived with pets of all kinds from hamsters, goldfish, dogs and cats to a rabbit, a goose, a duck and a very quiet beetle. With the obvious exceptions of the animals, her whole family is chronically addicted to print.
Angeline's poems have been read or performed in Singapore, Australia, Edinburgh, Finland and elsewhere, over radio and television, in libraries, book stores, theatres, parks, cafes and a converted Australian jail. Some have been displayed in cafes, libraries, museum sidewalks and as of 2024, on MRT trains. Others have been translated into Mandarin, Malay and Tamil, or set to music by Prof. Bernard Tan and Leong Yoon Pin. She has also collaborated with poets and artists from Asia, Australia, America and the U.K.
Since the 1970s, Angeline has encouraged literature lovers through school visits—first as a member of Katong Convent's choral speakers from ages 10 to 16—and subsequently as a guest speaker. She has encouraged young writers through the Creative Arts Programme, the NAC's Mentor Access Project, as well as through school visits. She was also honoured in 2009 by the Creative Arts Programme for her outstanding contributions to the programme.
Angeline has contributed her poems to various publications since the 1970s, and she was a featured poet at Singapore's first poetry festival, Wordfeast 2004.
Her first collection of poems was published in 1978 by SAYA, a magazine by and for school students edited by Goh Sin Tub, Lee Tzu Pheng, Marie Bong & others. A second collection, Collected Poems was published in 1986 by the National University of Singapore's Department of English Language and Literature, and her third collection is Closing my Eyes to Listen (2011), published by Landmark Books. She is currently working on a collection of new poems and selected favourites.
Her poems have also been featured in anthologies such as Singapore Writing (ed. Chandran Nair, 1977), but we have no legends (ed. K.C. Chew et al., 1978), Prize poems: winning entries of the first Ministry of Culture Poetry Writing Competition (Educational Publications Bureau, 1979), The Poetry of Singapore (1985), Journeys: Words, Home and Nation (1995), More Than Half the Sky (ed. Leong Liew Geok, 1998), No Other City (ed. Alvin Pang et. al, 2000), and A Given Grace (eds. Eric Tinsay Valles & Desmond Kon, 2021). Her poetry has also appeared online at Postcolonial Web, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Softblow, and Jogos Florais. She was also interviewed by Jogos Florais.
She was also invited to contribute to the inaugural issue of Fulcrum—an annual of poetry and aesthetics (ed. Philip Nickolaiev, Harvard, Cambridge Massachusetts, 2002), and has poems in other overseas publications such as Atlanta Review (Spring/Summer 2002), Theory of Knowledge for the IB Diploma (Cambridge University Press, 2005), and most recently, in Seagift 2024 (ed. Miriam Wei Wei Lo et al., 2024).
In 2013, her poem, “colours”, was part of a collaboration with the American calligrapher Thomas Ingmire, the British poet David Jones Annwn, and others. The project culminated in the exhibition Form and Expression—Calligraphy in Collaboration with Poets and Artists, held at the Center for Book and Paper Arts, Columbia College, Chicago.
Author Picture and Biography © Angeline Yap. All rights reserved.
References
“Angeline Yap: An Overview.” The Postcolonial Web.
“First Words: Women Poets from Singapore.” BiblioAsia. 1 April 2014.
“Form and Expression: The Written Word.” Thomas Ingmire. 2013.
“Interviewing Angeline Yap.” Jogos Florais. September 2019.