1. Arthur Yap Chioh Hiong was a Singaporean poet, writer and painter.
17 Facts About Arthur Yap
1. 2.
Arthur Yap was born in Singapore, the sixth child of a carpenter and a housewife.
3.
At Leeds Arthur Yap 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.
4.
Arthur Yap stayed on in the university's Department of English Language and Literature as a lecturer between the years 1979 and 1998.
5.
Between 1992 and 1996, Arthur 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.
6.
Arthur Yap was then diagnosed with lung cancer, and received radiotherapy treatment.
7.
Arthur 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.
8.
Unsurprisingly, the craft of Arthur Yap's voice has the admiration of other writers.
9.
In 1983, Arthur Yap was honored with Singapore's Cultural Medallion for Literature and the South-East Asian Write Award in Bangkok.
10.
Arthur Yap described this as one of the high points in his literary career.
11.
Arthur Yap's poems have been included in a literature course offered by McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, and collected in anthologies like New Voices of the Commonwealth, The Flowering Tree and The Second Tongue: An Anthology of Poetry from Malaysia and Singapore.
12.
Arthur Yap served as the general editor of literary magazine Singa, first published in 1981.
13.
In 1998, Arthur Yap received the Montblanc-NUS Centre for the Arts Literary Award for English.
14.
On 13 April 1969 Arthur Yap held his first solo art exhibition featuring 44 square abstract paintings at the National Library in Stamford Road.
15.
Arthur Yap went on to have a total of seven solo exhibitions in Singapore, as well as participating in group exhibitions in Malaysia, Thailand and Australia.
16.
Arthur Yap's paintings were chosen to represent Singapore at the Adelaide Festival of Arts in 1972.
17.
The cancer had recurred in 2004, and Arthur Yap underwent major surgery to remove his voice box.