Chen Xianfa 陈先发

Born in 1967 in Tongcheng, Anhui Province, Chen Xianfa graduated from Fudan University in 1989. He has published over thirty books including the poetry collections The Inscriber’s Heart, Nine Pieces, Broken Walls and Spiritual Journeys, and Blue Vortex; a series of essay collections, Notes from Heichi Dam; and the novel Melody that Tugs at the Soul. He has been awarded the Lu Xun Prize for Literature, the Chinese Literature Media Award, the October Literature Prize, and the Silver Willow Award at the Cambridge Xu Zhimo Poetry and Arts Festival, among others, and won the Columbia Journal’s Spring 2022 Translation Contest. In 2015 he was one of ten poets, including Bei Dao, to be honored by the Zhonghao Book Company for their contributions to ‘a century of new Chinese poetry’. His works have been translated into many languages including English, French, Russian, Spanish, Greek, and Polish. Chen Xianfa currently serves as Vice Chairman of the China Writers Association’s Poetry Committee, and he is also Chairman of the Anhui Writers Association and of the Anhui chapter of the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles.