ADNAN AL-SAYEGH

DONG XIAO

FENG NA

GEOFFREY GALLEY

JAMES BYRNE

JAMES COGHILL

JIDI MAJIA

LACHLAN MACKINNON

LUCY HAMILTON

MIMI KHALVATI

RICHARD BERENGARTEN

SANDEEP PARMAR

SASHA DUGDALE

STEPHEN CHERRY

YANG KE

ZHAO XIAOMENG

Dong Xiao, whose real name is Qiu Xiaodong, has been honoured with the Cambridge Xu Zhimo Poetry & Art Award, Chinese Poem Trend Award. He is currently Council Member of the Chinese Poetry Association and Chief Editor at Chinese Poetry Forum.

Feng Na, of the Bai People, was born in 1985 in Lijiang, Yunnan. She teaches at Zhongshan University, where she graduated. Feng Na is a member of the China Writer's Association, as well as a contract writer at Guangdong Provincial Liberal Art Institute. Her works include The Night Chosen by Countless Lights and In Search of Cranes. Feng Na has received the Chinese Literature Young Poet Award, and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize (U.S.). She participated in the 29th Qingchun Poem Gathering, and was the 12th Poet-in-residence at Capital Normal University.

Geoffrey achieved BSc Applied Physics and MSc Operational Research at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. He worked for the Aspect Vision Care Ltd – and received the Queen's Award for Industry (Technology) in 1998. He started to work for Farnborough Aircraft Co Ltd after 2003, developed Kestrel Light Aircraft and the prototype flew at the Farnborough Air show in 2006. Geoffrey Galley also enjoys poetry writing apart from being a physicist. His submission to the Cambridge Xu Zhimo Poetry & Art festival last year (The Villa Ephrussi) is shortly to be hung at the French state owned museum in Cap Ferrat France.

James Byrne's most recent poetry collections are Everything Broken Up Dances (Tupelo, US, 2015) and White Coins (Arc Publications, UK, 2015). He is the editor of The Wolf, International Editor for Arc Publications and teaches at Edge Hill University where he is co-editing Atlantic Drift: An Anthology of Poetry & Poetics (out in September from Edge Hill University Press/Arc Publications).

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.

Jidi Majia is a Yi-Nuosu poet born in 1961 in Sichuan. He was mentored by the renowned poet Ai Qing and gained national attention when his collection Song of Love won the Third China National Poetry Prize in 1986. His work has been translated into many European languages, and he has been awarded numerous international prizes, including the Sholokhov Memorial Medal for Literature in 2006 from the Russian Writers’ Association, and a Certificate for Outstanding Contributions in Poetry from the Bulgarian Writers’ Association that same year. Jidi Majia at present holds the posts of Vice-Chairman and Secretary-of-the-Secretariat of the China Writers Association, with concurrent posts as president of China Ethnic Minority Writers Society and Adviser to the Poetry Institute of China.

Lucy Hamilton co-edits Long Poem Magazine. Her collection of prose poems, Stalker (Shearsman 2012), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and was chosen as a core set book on a new ‘Creative Writing Life Writing’ course at the University of Chester 2016-2017. Her next collection is due from Shearsman in 2018. Work-in-progress explores her extended family - history, geography, mythology - through photographic - collages and the poems written about them afterwards. Recent poetry and artwork have appeared in Artemis, Long Exposure, Ink, Sweat & Tears and The Wolf.

Mimi Khalvati was born in Iran. She has published eight collections with Carcanet Press, including The Meanest Flower, shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize 2007, and Child: New and Selected Poems 1991 - 2011, a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. Her awards include a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors, a major Arts Council Writer’s Award and she is the founder of The Poetry School and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her most recent collection, The Weather Wheel, published by Carcanet in 2014, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and a Book of the Year in The Independent.

Richard Berengarten (born in London in 1943) is a well-known British and international poet. A Bye-Fellow of Downing College, Cambridge, he has published over 25 books and received many poetry awards, and his poetry has been translated into more than 100 languages. Richard Berengarten has had many recent visits to China, and was one of the co-ordinators of the first Cambridge Xu Zhimo Poetry & Art Festival (2015).

Sasha Dugdale is a poet, translator and editor. She has published three collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Red House (Carcanet, 2011). Her long poem ‘Joy’ won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2016. She translates poetry and plays from Russian and has worked with theatres across the UK and US on new productions of contemporary Russian plays. She is currently working on translations of Maria Stepanova’s poems for publication in the UK. Sasha is editor of Modern Poetry in Translation and co-editor of the international anthology Centres of Cataclysm (Bloodaxe, 2016).

Dr Stephen Cherry is the Dean of King's College, Cambridge. As Dean, Dr Cherry is a senior member of the College and has many administrative responsibilities, including overseeing the wellbeing of the famous Chapel. He is also Director of Studies in Theology. Dr Cherry's writing and speaking is informed by his studies both in Psychology and Theology. One of his books has been translated into Korean and one is also being translated into Chinese. His deep understanding about the subtle connection and connotation within the two disciplines has made great contributions to his academic achievements. Dr Cherry is also a passionate poet, having written poems relevant to his fields of expertise.

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.

Zhao Xiaomeng, with his pen name of Swordsman of Dream, was born in Hechuan, Chongqing in 1973. He currently lives in Chengdu, the capital of southwest China’s Sichuan Province. He serves as a member of the Chinese Writers Association, All Committee of Sichuan Provincial Writers Association, and routine Deputy Chief Editor of West China City Daily. He has been engaged in poetry creation since 1986. His poems have been published in more than 100 newspapers and journals, including People’s Daily, People’s Literature, and Poetry Monthly, and selected into over 20 kinds of selection books. He has won more than 60 awards, and published six anthologies of poetry and prose. It was in July 2017 that he was invited to attend Cambridge Xu Zhimo Poetry and Arts Festival.