Sonnets From a Servant: Reflections on duty, leadership and service
Description About the Author This is the leadership book written in 14-line rhyming poems that literally no one asked for. Joshua Yap (Ip) spent twenty-six years as an artillery officer and public servant, while leading a strange second life as an award-winning poet, editor and literary organiser. In these sonnets and accompanying prose notes, he turns the machinery of public service—backup slides, meeting minutiae, policy-making, change management, and the occasional existential crisis—into a wry manual for servant leadership and middle management. They say history doesn’t repeat itself. Bureaucracies always do. Now, somehow, they rhyme. Dr Joshua Yap aka Joshua Ip, is a Singaporean poet, editor, literary organiser, and former public servant / military officer [SLTC(NS)]. He has published seven-ish poetry collections, winning the Singapore Literature Prize for his debut, sonnets from the singlish (2012), and Book of the Year and Best Literary Work at the Singapore Book Awards 2025 for ownself say ownself (2024). He won the Golden Point Award for English Prose in 2013, was second for English Poetry in 2011, and received an honourable mention for Chinese Poetry in 2015. He received the Young Artist Award from Singapore’s National Arts Council in 2017. He has co-edited eleven literary anthologies. He co-founded the literary non-profit Sing Lit Station in 2016, and joined it as Executive Director / Station Jaga in 2026. He served in the Singapore Armed Forces for 26 years as an artillery officer and eight years in the Ministry of Defence. You can find more of his work at joshuaip.com.