Joshua Ip (b. 1982)
BIOGRAPHY
Joshua Ip is a poet, editor and literary organiser. He is the author of five-ish volumes of poetry from Math Paper Press: sonnets from the singlish (2012), making love with scrabble tiles (2013), sonnets from the singlish upsize edition (威力加强版) (2015), footnotes on falling (2018), and translations to the tanglish (2021). He co-won the Singapore Literature Prize in 2014 for his debut collection. He won the Golden Point Award for English Prose in 2013 for the short story "The Man Who Turned Into a Photocopier," was runner-up for English Poetry in 2011, and received an Honorable Mention for Chinese Poetry in 2015. He received Singapore’s Young Artist Award in 2017, and was a WrICE fellow in 2018.
Joshua has co-edited eleven poetry anthologies: the SingPoWriMo series from 2014-2016; the A Luxury We Cannot Afford (2014) and A Luxury We Must Afford (2016) sister anthologies; Unfree Verse (2016), a historical anthology of formal writing in Singapore; Twin Cities (2017) an anthology of Hong Kong and Singapore twin cinema poetry; Call and Response (2018) and Call and Response 2 (2021), Singaporean migrant anthologies with local and migrant writers responding to each other in poetry and prose; 11 x 9 (2019), an anthology of collaborative poetry between Singapore and the Philippines; and to let the light in (2021), an anthology on life and death and palliative care in partnership with the Asia Pacific Hospice Network. He also co-edited the “Writing Singapore” folio of Cha: An Asian Journal in 2018, and the Singapore folio for Cordite Poetry Review in 2020. He has been working on his first graphic novel, Ten Stories Below, for literally forever.
Joshua strongly believes in building the writing community in Singapore, and initiated the first Singapore Poetry Writing Month (SingPoWriMo) in April 2014, gathering 400 poets to write a poem a day for the entire month. Subsequently, he has helped to found or facilitate a wide variety of writing groups — Math Remedial, the Image-Symbol Department, Ministry of Noise, Burn After Reading, etc. He organised the first Manuscript Bootcamp in Southeast Asia for six young poets in 2015, and published them between 2015 and 2016 under Ten Year Series, an imprint of Math Paper Press.
Author Photo © Jon Gresham. Author Biography © Joshua Ip. All rights reserved.
