March 2026: New Chinese Poetry@Leeds

This month, rather than featuring a specific author in our bookclub, we are focusing on a new initiative to promote new Chinese poetry. Our Centre is delighted to collaborate with the world-renowned Poetry@Leeds in this venture. While our main focus to date has been fiction, inspired by previous poetry events with Xi Chuan, Han Dong and Yu Youyou, along with the editing of a special issue of Stand magazine on Chinese Journeys, featuring a range of poets and prose writers, this seems a natural next step.

Our two Centres started working together back in 2019 with a two-day event which brought together a large number of both established and emerging poets from China and the UK, with the aim of creating dialogue and synergies through poetry.

Since then our Centres have hosted poets under the Cheney Fellowship and the new Cheney Creative Fellowship scheme (Bai Hua, Tammy Ho Lai-ming and Shara McCallum), have run joint events, and are co-organising a major poetry exchange in April 2026, with Southwest Jiaotong University, in Chengdu, which will be attended by 7 poets from the UK and 22 poets from China.

To celebrate this collaboration, for this month's bookclub you can read some Leeds-inspired poems by our visiting Cheney Fellow, Bai Hua, one in response to a poem by the UK poet laureate Simon Armitage, and one a reflection on our city, aptly named 'Northern Heart of England'. You can read further poems by Bai Hua, and an overview of his work, in our earlier bookclub feature.

We have an on-going dedicated blog thread, which has been curated and written by Chinese-English literary translator and Leeds Creative Fellow Austin Woerner. Read this to find out more about these events, and about some of the poets who will be attending, and read samples of their work in translation. We are very grateful to Austin for all his work on this.