Jerrold Yam is a Singaporean lawyer based in the City of London. He is the author of three poetry collections: Intruder (Ethos Books), Scattered Vertebrae (Math Paper Press) and Chasing Curtained Suns (Math Paper Press).

Jerrold won first place and three honourable mentions for poetry at the National University of Singapore’s Creative Writing Competition in 2011. Since then, he has been named by Singapore’s National Arts Council as one of the “New Voices of Singapore 2014”, and his poems have been published in Poetry London, Magma, Oxford Poetry, The London Magazine, Ambit, Prairie Schooner, Wasafiri, Washington Square Review, The Straits Times and Time Out Magazine. 

In 2024, he won the Cheltenham Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize for Poetry, the Magma Poetry Pamphlet Competition and The London Magazine Poetry Prize. He was a 2024 Writer-in-Residence at the UK’s National Centre for Writing.

Additionally, his poems have been selected for anthologies such as Where Else: An International Hong Kong Poetry Anthology (Verve Poetry Press, 2023), Quiet Loving, Ravaging Search — 20 Years of QLRS (Word Image Books, 2021), Exhale: An Anthology Of Queer Singapore Voices (Math Paper Press, 2021), Poetry Moves (Ethos Books, 2020), Lines Spark Code (Ethos Books, 2017), We Contain Multitudes: Twelve Years of Softblow (Epigram Books, 2016), UNION (Ethos Books, 2015), Kulit: Asian Literature for the Language Classroom (Pearson, 2014), Starry Island: New Writing from Singapore (University of Hawaii Press, 2014), Fatherhood (Emma Press, 2014) and Moving Words (The Literary Centre, 2011).

Jerrold has been a featured author at literary festivals such as the Cheltenham Poetry Festival, Ledbury Poetry Festival, Poetry Festival Singapore and Singapore Writers Festival, educational institutions such as SOAS University of London, National University of Singapore, Raffles Institution and Anglo-Chinese School (Independent), and events such as Singapore Day in London and the Southbank Centre’s Festival of Love.

His poems, which are included in the Singapore-Cambridge GCE A-Level and O-Level syllabi, have been translated into Mandarin and Spanish.