Yao Feng

Beijing-born poet Yao Feng (姚风) has lived in Macau for many years, and is currently a professor of Portuguese literature at the University of Macau. His poems have been published in many Chinese and Portuguese literary magazines, in both languages, and sometimes bilingually. He is a translator and founding editor of the magazine Chinese and […]

Yau Ching

Born in Hong Kong, Yau Ching received her PhD in Media Arts from Royal Holloway, University of London. She was a postdoctoral fellow in Women’s Studies at the University of Hawaii, and also completed postgraduate studies in Studio Art at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York. Yau Ching is a cultural studies […]

Yu Yoyo

Born in 1990, Sichuanese poet Yu Yoyo had already begun to earn critical attention before she turned sixteen, publishing dozens of poems in Poetry, Poetry Monthly and other prestigious publications in China. She studied business management and accounting in university, but never gave up on her long-standing passion for poetry and finally embraced her life’s […]

Dave Haysom

Dave Haysom is a literary translator and editor who has been living in Beijing since 2007. He first started publishing translations online at spittingdog.net in 2012. From 2014 to 2018 he was joint managing editor of Pathlight, a quarterly journal of Chinese literature in translation, and in 2015 he helped launch “Read Paper Republic”, a […]

Shen Haobo

Poet, publisher and venture capitalist, Shen Haobo was born in Jiangsu Province in 1976. He graduated from Beijing Normal University and became known as a proponent of the “Bottom-Half Body” movement that sought to do-away with many of the taboos regarding explicit content in poetry, instead embracing an animalistic approach to forbidden subject areas. His […]

Xiao An

Xiao An (born in 1964) is a poet of the fei-fei (“not-not”) school. For decades she combined a writing career with her work as a nurse in a Chengdu psychiatric hospital, earning the respect of the literary world through poems that fuse classical Chinese influences with the stark confessional tone of Sylvia Plath. Her 2002 […]

Rong Yu

Rong Yu’s poems are observational, zooming into the mundane routines of clipping toenails or getting a haircut. Detached and ironic, they imbue the texture of everyday life in the cafés, bars, kitchens and train carriages of Sichuan with a pervasive sense of youthful ennui. The concrete specificity of Rong Yu’s verse is frequently destabilised by […]

How Did I Get Here?

Translator Brian Holton has won The Sarah Maguire Prize for his work on ‘Anniversary Snow’ by Chinese Yang Lian. Here he reflects on his life as a translator.

Where did ‘Anniversary Snow’ fall?

‘For a poet, writing is like running a marathon’: The Chinese poet Yang Lian responds to winning the Sarah Maguire Prize with a reflection on his approach to poetry.

What is Chinese ‘Lower Body Poetry’?

‘Only those who can’t find joy go looking for thought. Look for thought in poetry? Are you sick or something?’ Literary translator and editor Dave Haysom introduces Chinese ‘Lower Body Poetry’