ALEŠ ŠTEGER

BEI DAO

ELISA BIAGINI

JAMES COGHILL

LAVINIA GREENLAW

NIKOLA MADZIROV

OUYANG JIANGHE

ROD MENGHAM

SHI KAI

VAHNI CAPILDEO

YANG KE

YU MINQUAN

Aleš Šteger is a poet, essayist and novelist, writing in Slovenian. Aleš belongs to a generation of writers that started to publish right after the fall of Yugoslavia. His first poetry collection Šahovnice ur (1995) was sold out in three weeks after publication and indicated a new generation of Slovenian artists and writers. Šteger's books have been translated into sixteen languages and his poems appeared in internationally renown magazines and newspapers as The New Yorer, Boston review, Die Zeit, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, TLS and many others. Among other prizes and honours his ENglish translation of Knjiga reči (Thee Book of Things (BOA Editions, 2010)) won two mayor U.S. translation awards (BTBA award and AATSEL). Besides writings and translating from German, English and Spanish Aleš is also the progrmme director of Beletrina Academic Press that he co-founded (www.studentskazalosba.org). From 1995 to 2004 he was the initiator and programme director of the international poetry festival Days of Poetry and Wine (www.stihoteka.si). He worked also as programme director of the Terminal 12 - programme strand at the Maribor 2012 European Capital of Culutre. Šteger received numerous national and international prizes and honours. He received the title of Chevalier des Artes et Lettres from the French state. He is a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts. Since 2012 he is working on a performatice writing project > Written on Site<, maing one public writing performance a year.

Bei Dao, born in 1949, is one of China’s most important contemporary authors and representatives of Ménglóng Shi Rén, or “Misty Poets”, and he is the co-founder of the poetry journal Jintian (Today). He wrote collections of poems, and his work has been translated into more than twenty languages. He was also nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature, and received awards from Tucholsky Prize from Swedish PEN, PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award, Guggenheim Award. He is also an honourable member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Elisa Biagini lives in Florence, Italy after having taught and studied in the US for several years (Ph.D. Rutgers University). Her poems have been published in several Italian and American reviews and anthologies. She has published 6 poetry collections- some bilingual- such as “L’Ospite”, (Einaudi, 2004), “Fiato. parole per musica” (2006), “Nel Bosco” (Einaudi, 2007), "The guest in the wood" (Chelsea editions, 2013 - “2014 Best Translated Book Award” ) and "Da una crepa" (Einaudi, 2014). Her poems have been translated into English, German, Spanish, Portoguese, French, Croatian, Japanese, Slovak, Slovenian, Arabic, Serbian, Chinese and Russian and she has been invited to important poetry festivals such as: “Stanza-Scotland’s International Poetry Festival”, St. Andrews, Scotland; “Dubai International Poetry Festival”, UAE; “poesie festival berlin”, Berlin; International Writers Workshop, Hong Kong, “Struga Poetry evenings”, Struga, Macedonia, “Poetry Parnassus”, London, England; “Queensland poetry festival”, Brisbane, Australia. She has translated several contemporary American poets for reviews, anthologies and complete collections (“Nuovi Poeti Americani” Einaudi, 2006) and she teaches Creative Writing-Poetry, Travel Writing, Literature and Art History in Italy and abroad. Along with her work as a poet, Elisa has presented several installation projects in relevant art spaces and has collaborated with musicians, artists and choreographers.

James Coghill is an ecopoet subsisting in the vast bracket of 'getting there' with a sustained interest in the lyric sequence, animal studies, and Swedish language and culture. With poems published in The Rialto, Blackbox Manifold, and Lighthouse, his first pamphlet is forthcoming. He is currently working on a sequence responding to the work of late Tang dynasty poet Meng Chiao.

Lavinia Greenlaw is a writer who lives in London. She studied seventeenth-century art and her interest in perception, optical technologies, landscape and questions of travel led to her being the first artist in residence at the Science Museum. She has published five collections of poetry, most recently A Double Sorrow: Troilus and Criseyde. Her other works include two novels and the memoir, The Importance of Music to Girls. Her immersive sound work for Art angel/Manchester International Festival won the 2011 Ted Hughes Award. Her first short film, The Sea is an Edge and an Ending, a study of the impact of dementia on our sense of time and place, drawing on Shakespeare’s Tempest, will premiere at the Estuary festival in September 2016. She also writes about music, perception and art. Her commissions have included pieces on Joy Division for the London Review of Books, a total solar eclipse for The New Yorker, and a poem to mark the centenary of the Theory of Relativity for the Science Museum. Her work for radio includes documentaries about vision and light with subjects ranging from Arctic midsummer and midwinter to a year-long study of the solstices and equinoxes in Britain. She has also written and directed several radio dramas. Formerly Professor of Poetry at the University of East Anglia, she has been a Visiting Professor at King’s College London and will be the Samuel Fischer Guest Professor at the Freie Universität Berlin in Spring 2017.

Macedonia's Nikola Madzirov is one of the most powerful voices in contemporary European poetry. Born in a family of Balkan War refugees in Strumica in 1973, he grew up in the Soviet era in the former Republic of Yugoslavia ruled by Marshall Tito. When he was 18, the collapse of Yugoslavia prompted a shift in his sense of identity – as a writer reinventing himself in a country which felt new but was still nourished by deeply rooted historical traditions. The example and work of the great East European poets of the post-war period – Vasko Popa, Czesław Miłosz, Zbigniew Herbert – were liberating influences on his writing and thinking. The German weekly magazine Der Spiegel compared the quality of his poetry to Tomas Tranströmer's. There is a clear line from their generation, and that of more recent figures like Adam Zagajewski from Poland, to Nikola Madzirov, but Madzirov's voice is a new 21st century voice in European poetry and he is one of the most outstanding figures of the post-Soviet generation. Remnants of Another Age, his first book of poetry published in English, is introduced by Carolyn Forché, who writes: 'Madzirov calls himself "an involuntary descendant of refugees", referring to his family's flight from the Balkan Wars a century ago: his surname derives from mazir or majir, meaning "people without a home". The ideas of shelter and of homelessness, of nomadism, and spiritual transience serves as a palimpsest in these Remnants' – while Madzirov himself tells us in one of his poems, 'History is the first border I have to cross.'

Ouyang Jianghe, formerly known as Jiang He, was born in Luzhou, Sichuan province in 1965. He is a famous poet, critic of poetry, music and culture. He is acclaimed to be the best Chinese poet in the international field and his selected work includes the long poems Cliff Coffin, Glass factory, etc. He has already published more than 200 pieces of poetry and critic articles of up to 250 000 words on contemporary arts, music, film and drama.

Rod Mengham’s published poetry includes Chance of a Storm (Carcanet, 2015) and Unsung: New and Selected Poems (Salt, 2001). He has collaborated with Marc Atkins on a book of texts and film stills, Still Moving (Veer, 2014) and on Sounding Pole films. He is the publisher of Equipage, Reader in Modern English Literature at Cambridge University and Curator of Works of Art at Jesus College, Cambridge. He has published monographs and edited collections of essays on nineteenth and twentieth century fiction, violence and avant-garde art, the 1940s, contemporary poetry; anthologies Altered State: the New Polish Poetry [ed. Mengham, Pioro, Szymor] (2003), Vanishing Points: New Modernist Poems [ed. Kinsella, Mengham](2005); translations, including Speedometry [poems by Andrzej Sosnowski] (Contraband, 2014).

Shi Kai was born in Fuzhou, Fujian province in 1951. He is the vice president of the International Association of Calligraphers, and the former vice president of Fujian Calligrapher’s Association.

Vahni Capildeo is a British Trinidadian writer. After completing a DPhil in Old Norse and translation theory, she has worked in a number of roles, including: a lexicographer at the Oxford English Dictionary; Contributing Editor at the Caribbean Review of Books; an Information and Communications volunteer in the Trading Division at Oxfam Head Office; Senior Programme Officer at Commonwealth Writers; University teaching and research; and the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellowship at the University of Cambridge. She has a particular interest in boundaries between the human and the natural; multilingualism, memory, and the poetics of place. She was the first poet on tour for the Out of Bounds poetry project, which is creating a new, clickable and diverse digital poetry map of Britain. In 2015-16 she is combining travel with archival research, supported by the Harper-Wood Studentship (St. John's College, Cambridge). She has published five books and two pamphlets, of which the most recent are Measures of Expatriation (Carcanet; 2016) [shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Best Collection Prize]; Simple Complex Shapes (Shearsman, 2015); and Utter (Peepal Tree, 2013).

Yang Ke was born in Guangxi province in 1957. He is a renowned Chinese poet who is now the Vice President of the Writers' Association of Guangdong province and a state first rate writer and editor. He is amongst the third generation of China’s powerful poets and one of the representative poets of folk writings. A large number of his works including poems, reviews, essays and novels are published in many of China’s most influential journals such as People’s Literature, Shi Kan, and Chinese Writers, and also many folk journals, overseas journals or Internet journals such as They, Fei Fei, and Yi Hang.

Yu Mingquan, born in 1963, is a calligrapher, poet, art critic, professor at Shandong University of Arts, vice-president of Shandong Association of Calligraphers, and Executive Director of the International Association of Calligraphers. He has published nine collections of art works. He is also Director of the Art Centre of Chinese Characters.