ADNAN AL-SALYEGH

ALEŠ ŠTEGER

ALISON GIBBS

ANGELA LEIGHTON

ANTHONY RUDOLF

BEI DAO

CLIVE WILMER

DAVID RUSHMER

DONG XIAO

ELISA BIAGINI

FENG NA

GEOFFREY GALLEY

GEORGE SZIRTES

HARIS PSARRAS

JAMES BYRNE

JAMES COGHILL

JIDI MAJIA

JOANNE LIMBURG

LACHLAN MACKINNON

LAVINIA GREENLAW

LI HAIZHOU

LIANG PING

LINDA SHEEN

LU YUN

LUCY HAMILTON

LUCY SHEERMAN

MIMI KHALVATI

NASOS VAYENAS

NIKOLA MADZIROV

OUYANG JIANGHE

PETER HUGHES

QI REN

RICHARD BERENGARTEN

ROD MENGHAM

ROWAN WILLIAMS

RUPERT BROOKE

SANDEEP PARMAR

SASHA DUGDALE

SHI KAI

SHU TING

STAV POLEG

STEPHEN CHERRY

STEPHEN WATTS

TIMOTHY ADÈS

VAHNI CAPILDEO

VENERABLE MASTER YUEZHEN

WENDY COPE

XIANG YIXIAN

XUE YIWEI

YANG KE

YANG LIAN

YU MINGQUAN

YU YAN

ZHAO XIAOMENG

Adnan al-Sayegh was born in al-Kufa, Iraq in 1955 and is one of the most original voices of his generation of poets. His poetry denounces the devastation of wars and the horrors of dictatorship. Adnan has published eleven collections of poetry, including the 550-page Uruk's Anthem. He left his homeland in 1993, lived in Amman, and Beirut then took refuge in Sweden in 1996. Since 2004 he has been living in exile in London. He has received several international awards; among them, the Hellman-Hammet International Poetry Award (New York 1996), the Rotterdam International Poetry Award (1997) and the Swedish Writers Association Award (2005), and has been invited to read his poems in many festivals across the world.

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.

Alison Gibb is a British poet-artist. Originally trained in visual art, she began working in poetry in 2009. Her publications include I am knot…a Poster in Pieces of Power (Ambergris Editions, 2016), A Vase (Kni ves, Forks and Spoons Press, 2017), Pomegranates In the Oak CD (ZimZalla, 2013) and Silent Diagrams (Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2013). She has performed poetry across the UK including PolyPLY, The Other Room and the Cardiff Poetry Experiment and was a resident at the Banff Arts Centre, Canada in 2013.

Angela Leighton was educated in Edinburgh and Oxford and has taught for many years at the University of Hull. She is now Professor of English and Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College Cambridge. She is also a fellow of the British Academy. She has published widely on nineteenth and twentieth century literature, including among other, Jane Austin, Tennyson and De Quincey. She has published short stories in carious magazines and her poetry has appeared in many journals.

Anthony Rudolf was born in 1942 in London. He studied modern languages and social anthropology in Cambridge. Among his many publications are three memoirs: The Arithmetic of Memory (1999), Silent Conversations: A Reader's Life (2013) and A Vanished Hand (2013). Rudolf has edited magazines and anthologies; his poems, reviews, articles, translations, interviews and obituaries have appeared in many journals. An occasional broadcaster, he was visiting lecturer in Arts and Humanities at London Metropolitan University and Royal Literary Fund Fellow at two universities. He is Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the English Association and Chevalier de l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He founded Menard Press in 1969 and ran it for 40 years.

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.

Clive Wilmer was born in Harrogate in 1945, grew up in London and was educated at King's College Cambridge. He now teaches English at Cambridge, where he is Emeritus Fellow in English at Sidney Sussex College and an Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of English. He is also an honorary Fellow of Anglia Ruskin University and has recently been a Visiting Professor at Ca' Foscari University in Venice. He has published many books of his poetry including works published with Carcanet Press and Worple Press. Collections of his poems have been published in Hungarian (2002) and in Spanish (2011). In 2005 he was awarded the annual Pro Cultura Hungarica Medal for translation by the Hungarian Ministry of Culture. An occasional broadcaster, he fronted BBC Radio 3's Poet if the Month programmes. He has becomne a frequent contributor - as poet, essayist and reviewer - to a variet of periodicals.

David Rushmer, born in 1965, is a writer and artist from the UK and was editor of pen; umbra magazine. He studied Visual Communication at University of East London, graduating in 1995, and has lived in Cambridge since 1997 working as a Senior Library Assistant at The English Faculty Library, University of Cambridge. His artworks and writings have appeared in over 30 journals and small press magazines in the UK, France and the USA. His artworks have also been exhibited in Cambridge, London and Yokohama.

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.

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.

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.

Born in Hungary in 1948, George Szirtes' first book of poems, The Slant Door (1979) won the Faber Prize. He has published many since then, Reel (2004) winning the T S Eliot Prize, for which he has been twice shortlisted since. Mapping the Delta appeared in 2016. His most recent book is the memoir, The Photographer at Sixteen (2019).

Hai-Sui Yu, who writes under the pen-name Nan Xiangzi, was born in Huizhou, a city in southern Anhui Province, China. He is a world-famous expert in Geomechanics as well as a poet. He completed his DPhil at the University of Oxford, and he is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. he is a former Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University of Nottingham and is now the Provost and Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leeds. His Chinese poems have been published in Poetry Journal, October, Journal of Selected Poems, Poetry Tide and Poetry Monthly in China.

Cam Rivers Publishing published a collection of his poems, Ode to the Beginning of Winter, in 2022.

Haris Psarras was born in Athens, Greece. He is a Fellow of Law at St. Catharine College, Cambridge. Haris has published five poetry books (in Greek). Translations of his poems have appeared in journals and anthologies in the UK, the US, France, Germany, Romania and Slovenia.

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.

Joanne Limburg has published three collections of poetry with Bloodaxe, the most recent being The Autistic Alice. Her other books include two memoirs and a novel, A Want of Kindness, based on the life of Queen Anne. She lives in Cambridge with her husband and son.

Lachlan Mackinnon was born in Aberdeen and educated in England at Charterhouse and Christ Church, Oxford. He retired after 30 years’ teaching and is now a freelance writer. He is the author of a few modern poetry books, and has written a biography of the first woman to win the Prix Goncourt, Elsa Triolet. He is reviewed widely in the national and literary press. He has written five poetry books, of which the most recent is Doves (Faber, 2017). In 2011 he received the Cholmondeley award. He lives in Ely with his wife, the poet Wendy Cope.

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.

Li Haizhou is a poet and writer from China. He was born in the mountainous city of Chongqing in 1973. He started writing when he was 16 years old. His main works include the poetry anthology The Dance on the Harp, A Lonely King, and the novel Snicker. He has won several literature awards. In addition, his works have been translated into multiple languages. Now Haizhou lives in Chongqing and serves as the editor-in-chief of Culture of Geography.

Li Shaojun is well known as ‘a poet of nature’ for his frequent references to the mountains and plains, leaves and forests, rain and rivers, cloudscapes and oceans, as well as the creatures that inhabit the earth. But his poems always contain a human dimension and betray the emotions and attitudes of the narrator. In fact his most fully achieved work provides insight into the human condition and our insatiable desire to belong to this world and to resist the ravages of time.

Liang Ping is a Chinese contemporary poet and writer. Currently he is a member of the National Committee of the Chinese Writers Association, Deputy Director of the Poetry Committee of the Chinese Writers Association, Vice Chairman of the Writers Association of Sichuan Province and Chairman of the Chengdu Federation of Literary and Art Circles. He has published 10 poetry collections, including Rejecting Gentleness, Liang Ping's Poem Anthology, Ba and Shu: Two Duets, Thirty Years in the East River, Story of Wenchuan and Family Tree, comments on the poetry The Posture of Reading, an essay collection The Master Expressing by the Bank of the Stream and a long novel Chaotianmen. His poetry works have been translated into English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Bulgarian, Russian and other languages. He won the Special Award for his Chinese books, Guo Moruo Poetry Prize of the Chinese Writers, Bashu Literary Award of Sichuan Province and other awards.

Jiang Xin, who goes by the English name Linda Sheen, is a poet and scholar who graduated from the University of Manchester. Linda was an academic Visitor at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge from Sep 2016 to Sep 2017; Member of Pembroke Poetry Society (Pem Soc); Member of Pelican Poets and Writers (PPWers); Member of River Cam Poetry Society and Editor of River Cam Breeze Magazine.

Lu Yun, born in 1970, taught creative writing at Hunan Internation Economics University. His poems have been published in the Journal of Yunmeng and Mountain Flowers. His collections include Start-off (2015) and Wangyuechu Canpian (2011).

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.

Lucy Sheerman is currently working on a series of fan fiction versions of iconic novels including Rebecca (Dancing Girl Press) and Jane Eyre. She was an artist in residence at Metal Peterborough where she co-created a new Evensong for Peterborough Cathedral which explored whether long-term couples could take an extended journey to the moon together. Her sequence about the effect of the moon landings on the astronauts and their wives was published by Oystercatcher. Two plays, including a collaboration with the Apollo astronaut and poet Al Worden, have been commissioned by Menagerie for the Hot Bed New Writing Festival.

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.

Nasos Vayenas was born in 1945 in Drama, in northern Greece. He studied literature at the University of Athens, Rome, Essex and Cambridge. He wrote his Ph.D thesis on George Seferis at King's College and his book The Poet and the Dancer (1979), became an authoritative work on Seferis. Nasos's first book of poems appeared in 1974 and since then he has published ten more collections and book of imaginative prose, as well as several critical works, among them The Language of Irony, which was awarded the Greek National Prize for Criticism in 1995. He is the recipient of major literary awards, including the Greek National Prize for Poetry (2005) for his collection his collection Garland, the Attiglio Bertolucci Poetry Prize (Italy, 2007) and the Brano Radicevis Prize (Serbia, 2007).

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.

Peter Hughes is a poet and painter. He is also the founding editor of Oystercatcher Press, winner of the Michael Marks Award 'for outstanding UK publisher of poetry in pamphlet form'. Peter attended Chelthenham Art College and went on to study poetry. He studied at the Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology before completing a Master of Letters degree in Contemporary Poetry at Stirling University. He has worked translation, teaching and as an author. His Selected Poems were published by Shearsman in 2013 and Reality Street published Quite Frankly in 2015.

Qi Ren, born in 1965, is a poet, and Project Director and Secretary General of The All-China Poetry Reading Series. His poetry collections include The Gate of Fate and Scenery in the Palm. He received the first Shiguo Award in 1992, the Poetry Monthly annual prize in 2007 and, in 2009, the annual Award for Personal Achievement in Chinese Literature.

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).

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).

Dr Rowan Williams was educated at Dynevor Secondary Grammar School in Swansea, he came up to Christ's College in 1968. He studied for his doctorate at Christs Church and Wadham College Oxford. In 1984 he was elected a Fellow and Dean of Clare College, following this, at the age of 36, he was Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity for six years. He has since then served as the Bishop of Monmouth and the Archbishop of Wales and finally as the Archbishop of Canterbury from 2002-2012. He was awarded the Oxford higher degree of Doctor of Divinity in 1989 and has received honorary doctorates from more than a dozen universities including Cambridge and Durham. He is a noted poet and translator of poetry, speaking ten different languages.

Rupert Brooke was a distinguished English poet who was born in 1887 and died in 1915. Brooke won a scholarship to King's College, Cambridge, where he helped to found the Marlowe Society drama club and acted in Greek plays. He became a famous war poet with his poems 'The Dead' and 'The Soldier'. His most famous collection of poems, 1914 and Other Poems, was publsihed in 1915. He has featured in many films and novels because of his poetry, tragic early death and good looks. His poem 'Granchester', which features in the 2015 Xu Zhimo Anthology is set in the village near Cambridge and has become one of the most quoted poems in the English language. As well as a poet, Brooke was a distinguished letter writer. The major collection of the papers relating to his poetic work have been helf in King's College Archives for some years. In 2015 the College acquired, with generous support from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the largest private collection of his non-poetry archives.

Sandeep Parmar is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Liverpool where she co-directs Liverpool’s Centre for New and International Writing. She holds a PhD from University College London and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. Her books include Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies: Myth of the Modern, an edition of the Collected Poems of Hope Mirrlees (Carcanet, 2011), two books of her own poetry published by Shearsman: The Marble Orchard and Eidolon and the Collected Poems of Nancy Cunard (Carcanet, 2016). Her essays and reviews have appeared in the Guardian, The Los Angeles Review of Books, the Financial Times and the Times Literary Supplement. She is a BBC New Generation Thinker.

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).

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.

Shu Ting is the pen name of Gong Peiyu. Born in 1952, she is the leading female representative of the 'Misty Poets' and currently vice-president of the Fujian Writers Association. She has published many collections, including The Twin-Masted Yacht and The Singing Iris. She is particularly well known for her poems "To an Oak Tree" and "Motherland, My Dear Motherland", the first of which is included in this anthology.

Stav Poleg’s poetry has been published on both sides of the Atlantic, including in The New Yorker, Poetry London and Poetry Ireland Review. Her graphic-novel installation Dear Penelope, created with artist Laura Gressani, was acquired by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. She serves on the editorial board of Magma Poetry magazine and teaches for the Poetry School, London.

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.

Stephen Watts is a poet, translator and editor. The most recent books of his own poetry are Ancient Sunlight (2014) and Republic of Dogs/Republic of Birds (2016) with The Language of It forthcoming. Recent translations include the Iraqi poet Adnan al-Sayegh’s Pages From the Biography of An Exile (2016) and the Syrian poet Golan Haji’s Tree Whose Name I Don’t Know (2017). He has cultural roots in the Swiss-Italian Alps and the north of Scotland and has lived in London’s Whitechapel for the past 40 years. The interactions of place and memory – home and exile – have a vital role in his writing.

Timothy Adès, a rhyming translator-poet, has published almost 1,000 poems in French, Spanish, German and Greek, including over 100 sonnets. Many are on his website, or on brindinpress.com. His books in French are inspired by Jean Cassou and Robert Desnos and Victor Hugo; he has awards for these poets and for the Mexican Alfonso Reyes, and a book in Spanish inspired by the Venezuelan poet Alberto Arvelo Torrealba. Other favourites are Brecht, Sikelianós, Ricarda Huch and Nerval. He rewrote Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets without using the letter ‘E’, making Bard’s love-life easier to follow. He runs an occasional bookstall where he distributes translated poetry.

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).

Master Yuezhen was born in 1969 in Hangzhou City, Zhejiang Province. He is currently a director of the Buddhist Association of China, Acting Deputy Director of the China Buddhist Calligraphy & Painting Exchange Base, Deputy Director of the Buddhist Association of Zhejiang Province, Head Monk of Taoguang Temple, Chief Supervisor of Yongfu Temple, Head Monk of Gufangguang Temple on Tiantai Mountain and Chief Editor of Buddhism in Zhejiang and Buddhism in Hangzhou.

Wendy Cope OBE read history at Oxford and later worked as a teacher in London. She has been freelancing since the publication of her first book, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, in 1986. Her fifth collection of poems, Anecdotal Evidence, was published this year. She has also written for children and edited several anthologies. A volume of her prose pieces, Life, Love and The Archers, appeared in 2014. She lives in Ely with her husband, the poet Lachlan Mackinnon.

Xiang Yixian was born in 1963 in Sichuan Wanyuan. Now, he lives in Chengdu and is a Professor at Sichuan University. His translations include Poets Beyond Jianghu, Mass Tang Poetry, Viewing Items, My Confucius, My Pronunciation, The Chronicle of Chinese Carving Art and the long historical drama Legend of Mulan. The poetry won the first Chinese poetry contest of Poetry Newspaper, Tianduo (32nd year of the Sexagenary Cycle) Poetry Award, International Confucius Prize, Chinese Poet of the Year for the Chengdu Commercial News, the first Yang Wanli Poetry Award, Nomination of the Year in the Star Poetry Monthly, Poetry Award in the Li Bai Cup. His works have been collected in a variety of poetry collections both at home and abroad. In the 1980s, with his colleagues he successively established several folk poetry magazines such as: The Dynasty, The Red Flag and Xiang Wang.

Xue Yiwei, BA in Computer Science, MA in English Literature, PhD in Linguistics, is an acclaimed author of twenty books in Chinese, including five novels, six collections of short stories and novellas, and six literary essays. “A maverick in contemporary Chinese literature”, to quote Ha Jin, winner of the National Book Award, his works have been translated into English, French, Swedish, German and Italian. Shenzheners, his first work translated into English and released in 2016 has awarded a Blue Metropolis Literary Diversity Prize for a First Publication. Dr Bethune’s Children, a controversial novel, has drawn international attention since its publication in English in 2017.

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.

Yang Lian was born in Switzerland in 1955 and grew up in Beijing. His poems became to receive acclaim in the 1980s, especially when his sequence Norilang was published in 1983. His books include the long poem yi, Where the Sea Stands Still and Concentric Circles; and his writings have been translated into more than thirty languages. He has lived in London, among many other places and has collaborated widely with English-speaking poets. He has received a cluster of international awards.

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.

Yu Yan was born in Chongqing in 1967 and now lives in Beijing. He started writing poems in the 1980s and was a representative poet for college students in the 1980s. In the 1990s, he stopped writing. Then, in 2014, he resumed writing. He has published hundreds of works in well-known literary publications, including People's Literature, Chinese Writers, Shikan, The Star Poetry Monthly, Zhongshan Literary Bimonthly and Writer Magazine. He has published the poetry collection of Criticism and Self-Criticism. His works have been selected and included within several poetry anthologies. He has won the title of the 2016 Chinese Poets of the Year in Chengdu Commercial News and received the award of The Grand Poet of the Year in the first Caotang Poet Award ceremony.

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.