June 2025: Bai Hua 柏桦

Considered the central literary figure of the post-“Misty” poetry movement of the 1980s, Bai Hua was born in Chongqing in 1956. After graduating from the Guangzhou Foreign Languages Institute, he taught at various universities before starting work as an independent writer. His first book, Expression (1988), received immediate critical acclaim. A highly demanding writer, Bai Hua has composed only about ninety poems over the past thirty years, and from the late 1990s until 2007, he wrote no poetry at all. However, during this more than a decade of silence, he remained a prolific writer of prose and hybrid texts. Bai Hua has received the Rougang Poetry Award and the Anne Kao Poetry Prize.

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We're delighted to be hosting Bai Hua in Leeds this year, on a Cheney Fellowship. There'll be a number of events throughout the year where there'll be the chance to meet him and hear about his poetry. So we're very happy to be featuring him this month, at the beginning of his Fellowship.

The first event will be on Wednesday June 18th, when he'll be discussing the evolution of modern Chinese poetry over the course of the 20th century. Then there'll be a chance to hear from Bai Hua, along with a host of other brilliant poets, at a Poetry Showcase hosted by the University of Leeds Poetry Centre, as part of the Leeds Litfest. Some of his poems will also be featured in an upcoming issue of the renowned Stand magazine.

And this month we're featuring his poem 'Gooseberries' 醋栗, translated by Zhang Xinyue and Austin Woerner. It's a poem that shows Bai Hua's engagement with the work of other writers (Chekhov, in this case). You can read it here, in Chinese and in the English translation.

When did I start dreaming about owning a country estate? 

Eventually I bought one, paid for it by writing stories. 

Here in Melikhovo, I go to sleep early and wake up early, 

just like people used to do in the old days. 

To find out more about Bai Hua, you can read some of his poems in Poetry International. And he's also featured in PoetryEastWest, with a selection of poems translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain.