Joshua Ip (b. 1982)
BIOGRAPHY
Joshua Ip is a poet, editor and literary organiser. He is the author of six-ish volumes of poetry: sonnets from the singlish (Math Paper Press, 2012), making love with scrabble tiles (Math Paper Press, 2013), sonnets from the singlish upsize edition (威力加强版) (Math Paper Press, 2015), footnotes on falling (Math Paper Press, 2018), Farquhar (Ethos Books, 2020), translations to the tanglish (Math Paper Press, 2021), and ownself say ownself (Landmark Books, 2024). His latest new and selected collection gathers the best of his earlier collections, while presenting his spoken word work, experiments in form, and faith-ishy translations of the work of Pierre Vinclair, Pan Shou, Jay Chou and other unfortunates. 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. He completed his PhD in Creative Writing from RMIT’s Practice Research Seminars, with a thesis titled “always already translated: a Singapore poet in translation”.
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, the Singapore folio for Cordite Poetry Review in 2020, and curated the English poetry selection of the “Poetry on the MRT” project in 2024. As an occasional guest editor with poetry.sg, he has co-curated three poetic folios: Track Changes (2020), the Hong Kong-Singapore Digital Travel Bubble (2021) and Dead Poets Society (2023).
His poetry has been published in numerous print and online publications including Esquire, Monocle, Vogue, The Shanghai Literary Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Jakarta Post and The Straits Times. His short stories have been anthologised in From the Belly of The Cat, Balik Kampung 2A, and Best New Singaporean Short Stories 2. He used to write a regular satirical poetry column, Ipster Cafe, for The Middle Ground. He has represented Singapore at international literary festivals from Goa, Guangzhou, London, and New York City. He was selected as one of “20 New Asian Voices Under 40” by Griffith Review.
He has engaged in numerous literary collaborations, including Sing Lit Body Slam 1 and 2, the world’s first and second professional wrestling / performance poetry hybrid performances with Grapple Max pro wrestling; Farquhar: The Musical with Marc Nair and Mark Nicodemus Tan; and the stillborn graphic novel about Singapore after an apocalyptic flood, Ten Stories Below, with Timothy Wang and A.J. Robert. As a practising formalist, he has made a habit of creating local poetic forms, including the liwuli, empat perkataan, udaiyathaathu, vlle and tilde, while advocating for others such as the twin cinema.
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. In 2016, he gathered these initiatives to co-found Sing Lit Station, a literary non-profit to develop the Singapore writing scene. Sing Lit Station is supported by the NAC Major Company Grant up to 2025.
Author Photo and Biography © Joshua Ip. All rights reserved.
