Hong Kong ¨C As a teenager stuck in Hong Kong¡¯s pressure-cooker school system, Eric Yip found his escape in writing poetry ¡ª 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 says.
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