New Chinese Poetry@Leeds

The Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing is delighted to be collaborating with Poetry@Leeds, in the School of English, for a special focus on contemporary Chinese poetry and its English translation.

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, it seems natural to work with the University's world-renowned poetry centre, Poetry@Leeds, directed by Prof Kimberly Campanello.

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.

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.