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'Private rebellion': Hong Kong's anglophone poets gain recognition abroad
As a teenager stuck in Hong Kong's pressure-cooker school system, Eric Yip found his escape in writing poetry -- never dreaming that one day he would win a top prize halfway across the world.
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This photo taken on June 29, 2022 shows Eric Yip, winner of the UK's National Poetry Competition, posing for a portrait in central London. (AFP/Justin Tallis)
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s a teenager stuck in Hong Kong's pressure-cooker school system, Eric Yip found his escape in writing poetry -- never dreaming that one day his work would go on to win a top prize halfway across the world.
In March, at the age of 19, he became the youngest ever winner of the United Kingdom's National Poetry Competition.
He beat more than 7,000 contenders from 100 countries and placed himself squarely among a cohort of Hong Kong poets writing in English that has found increasing recognition over the past decade.
Now an economics undergraduate at Cambridge, Yip recalled the "liberating" feeling of reading material that had nothing to do with high-school English classes taught according to a strict syllabus.
"Writing poems was a private rebellion against this regimented approach," Yip told AFP.
His award-winning Fricatives begins with the narrator taking English lessons as a "spectacled boy with a Hong Kong accent" and opens up to explore issues of language, race, sex and migration.
A former British colony, Hong Kong has developed its own literary tradition in both Chinese and English, although anglophone poets remain a minority and receive little establishment support.
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