Eric Yip

Eric Yip is from Hong Kong. He has won the National Poetry Competition and an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors, and has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem and the Michael Marks Poetry Award. His writing has appeared in Best New Poets, The Guardian, Oxford Poetry, Poetry London, The Poetry Review, and Poets & Writers. He is the poetry editor at Cha.

Exposure

ignitionpress, April 2024, 34pp

Winner of a 2025 Eric Gregory Award

Shortlisted for the 2024 Michael Marks Poetry Award

Again and again in Exposure, a composed poetic intelligence comes up against a coiled sensuality, and the collision of the two is breathtaking. These poems speak with great originality and evocative power to the experience of straddling Britain and Hong Kong. Eric Yip is possessed of a humanely tender eye, drawn to and haunted by the moments of vulnerability that reveal us, stripped back, in our truest contours: ‘Never have I seen a man break // so completely, as if a vast crevasse / had unzipped his life.’ Exposure introduces us to an astonishing new voice, and one I will follow wherever it goes.

Sarah Howe

Exposure is both cinematic and still, precise and panoramic, every carefully-chosen word focused like a lens. The relationship between art and history is interrogated, how we carve our viewpoints and dissect our memories into singular scenes. Whilst reading Eric Yip, we see through his camera; each poem, a frame of life, hit by a new angle of light.

Caroline Bird, Eric Gregory Award

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Poems

‘Juvenilia’, Poetry London

‘Hexagram 64’, Basket

‘Wait Wait’, WMA

‘Horologist’, ‘Fishkeeping’, ‘That Year’, The Little Review

‘Somnambulist’, ‘Conservatoire’, ‘Birthday’, The Poetry Review

from Exposure

‘Ardently Love’, Oxford Poetry

‘Tenor’, fourteen poems

[Movement is the replacement of one], [With ease the brick houses shift as sight], The London Magazine

‘The Mills’, The Adroit Journal

‘Ma Tau Wai Road’, Magma

‘Broadway Cinematheque’, The Poetry Review

‘裂 / Tear’, Wildness

‘Fricatives’, The Poetry Review

Reprints in The Forward Book of Poetry 2025, The Forward Book of Poetry 2024, Where Else: An International Hong Kong Poetry Anthology, Best New Poets 2022

Prose

Appearances

Interviews with Oxford Faculty of English, Forward Arts Foundation, AFP, The Guardian, BBC Radio 4

Past events at The British Library, Poetry at Aldeburgh, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Fitzwilliam Museum, Queer East Festival, Ledbury Poetry House, Leeds Playhouse, Asymmetry Art Foundation, Verve Poetry Festival, St Paul’s Cathedral, The Common Press, and elsewhere

Contact