Angeline Yap won numerous prizes for student and undergraduate writing in the late '70s and early '80s. She has been contributing poetry to various publications in Singapore since the 1970s and has been working with the Creative Arts Programme since 1996. She is also a mentor with the Mentor Access Project, which is organised by the National Arts Council. Her Collected Poems was published in 1985. More recent anthologies containing her work are Words for the Twenty-Fifth (1990), Journeys: Words, Home & Nation -- An Anthology of Singapore Poetry (1995) and More Than Half The Sky (1998), Memories & Desires (1999), No Other City -- The Ethos Anthology of Urban Poetry (Feb. 2000), Rhythms -- A Singaporean Millenial Anthology of Poetry (Sep. 2000).

Her poem "Nightmare" has been set to music by Leong Yoon Pin and performed at international choir competitions by the Singapore Youth Choir. Another poem, "Blue", has been set to music by Prof. Bernard Tan.


Arthur Yap (1943 – 2006) was arguably the finest poet to emerge from Singapore. His first collection of poems, Only Lines, published in 1971, received the National Book Development Council of Singapore’s first award for poetry in 1976. He also received the Council’s award for Down the Line in 1982 and Man Snake Apple in 1988. In 1983, he was awarded the S.E.A. Write Award in Bangkok and the Cultural Medallion for Literature in Singapore. His poems have also been translated into Japanese, Mandarin and Malay, and were collected in The Space of City Trees: Selected Poems in 2000.

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."

Although never as public a figure in Singapore literature as Edwin Thumboo or even Lee Tzu Peng, Yap has been influential among the younger generations of Singapore writers, including Heng Siok Tian, Toh Hsien Min and Cyril Wong; the former two were students under him.

Yap was also an artist who held seven solo exhibitions in Singapore, as well as participating in group exhibitions in Malaysia, Thailand and Australia. He passed away in his sleep, at home, after two and half years of battling with throat cancer, on the night of 19 June 2006.


Recipient of 2003 Cultural Medallion for Literature, Yeng writes in the fields of poetry, fiction, essay, drama and literary critique. His works have been translated into English, Malay and Dutch. His fiction A Man Like Me won the National Book Development’s Book Award for 1987-88. Novel Tumult is the winner of Singapore Literature Prize 2004. Latest novel Trivialities About Me and Myself was selected to be one of top 10 Best Chinese Novels World-wide for year 2006.


Born in 1940
One of the pioneers of Singaporean drama in English, Yeo currently teaches creative writing at the Singapore Management University.

He has published three collections of poetry: Coming Home, Baby (1971); and Napalm Does Not Help (1977) and A Part of Three (1989). Leaving Home, Mother (1999) is a selection of poems, many of which interrogate nation- building., the Vietnam War, or address family ties, and materialism. The Adventures of Holden Heng (1986), is his only novel. Yeo has written six plays. The Singapore Trilogy (2001), comprising Are You There, Singapore? (1974), One Year Back Home (1980) and Changi (1996) dramatizes the politics of living in Singapore. Yeo s Second Chance (1988) examines why women graduates were not marrying, while The Eye of History (1992) is a historical fantasy. Your Bed is Your Coffin has yet to be staged.


Vivienne Yeo is a poet, writer and storyteller. She also dabbles with words in her capacity as a speechwriter, language mentor and creative writing coach. Once a denizen of New York and a former communications executive, she now resides in Singapore, her home country. If You’re Not, Why Not? is her first published work.


Yong has published four volumes of poetry: Isaac (1997); Isaac Revisited (2001); dowhile (2002) and Frottage (2005). He was a co-winner [together with Cyril Wong] of the 2006 Singapore Literature Prize for Frottage. His free verse is characterized by conversational ease. Self- effacing, wry and rarely satirical, Yong allows seriousness to sit engagingly on his work. He has also written for publications like The Straits Times and South China Morning Post. He regularly participates in literary festivals in Malaysia, Hong Kong, Australia and the US as well as organise monthly subTEXT readings since 2001.


Born in 1961
With well over 30 plays to her credit, Yu is one of the most prolific, versatile and international of Singaporean playwrights, Yu s first writings were in fiction. A Dream of China won the 1984 Asiaweek Short Story Competition.

Yu's plays are given to farce, satire, wit and a self-reflexivity. In Dead on Cue, runner-up in the 1987 NUS-Shell Short Play Competition, the main character never materializes. Yu regularly addresses gender issues. The pro-feminist The Woman in a Tree on the Hill won an Edinburgh Fringe First at the 1992 Festival. Other plays interrogate women s roles in a society of gendered expectations. Her comedy Viva Viagra (1999) won an Audience Award at Action Theatre s First 42 Theatre Festival. Hitting (on) Women won the 2007 Theatre Idol Competition. She wrote the musical A Twist of Fate (1987; 2005) and co-wrote another, Haunted (1999).

Yu attended the University of Iowa s International Writing Programme (1990/1991) on a Fulbright Scholarship. In 1996, she received the Singapore Youth Award (Arts and Culture) in 1997.