Hu Xian 胡弦

Hu Xian is a renowned poet whose published collections include Hourglass (2016), Empty Staircase (2017), Calming the Wind and Waves (2021), Prelude to Water Melody (2023), and Guessing a Tree (2024). He has received numerous awards, including Poetry Periodical’s Top Ten Young Poets of the New Century (2009), the Xu Zhimo Poetry Award (2012), the Rougang Poetry Award (2014), the Poetry Periodical Annual Poetry Award (2014), the Tencent Academy Literature Award (2016), the Huadi Literary Roundup’s Poet of the Year Award (2017), the Stars Poet of the Year Award (2018), the October Literature Award (2018), the Lu Xun Prize for Literature (2018), the Zhongshan Literature Award (2021), the Caotang Poetry Award Grand Prize (2022), the Cambridge Xu Zhimo Poetry and Arts Festival’s Silver Willow Prize (2022), and the Ocean Poetry Achievement Award (2024). He lives in Nanjing.

On his philosophy of writing poetry, Hu Xian writes:

A poem should have at its core something that cannot be described. But words can hint at its existence, draw it to our attention.

Narrative creates its own world. Leaving narrative leads people toward another world.

What we call witnessing or seeing may not be an object or an event, but rather the sense of crisis that small things carry within them about themselves and about the world.

Poetry is an indictment of life. A poet is a voyeur of his own soul. Nobody really understands one’s self; occasionally, poets glimpse their own secrets.