Xi Chuan 西川

Xi Chuan is a Chinese poet, essayist, and translator, and currently a distinguished professor at Beijing Normal University. He has published ten collections of poems, two books of essays and three books of critical writings, in addition to a play and numerous translations of Ezra Pound, Jorge Luis Borges, Czeslaw Milosz, Gary Snyder, and others. His awards include the Lu Xun Prize for Literature (2001), the China Book Trade Annual Selection’s Author of the Year award (2018), Sweden’s Cikada Prize for Poetry (2018), and Japan’s Tokyo Poetry Prize (2018). He was also one of the top ten winners of the 1999 Weimar International Essay Prize Contest, Germany. His work has been translated into many languages and has been widely anthologized and published in about thirty countries. His book of poems in English translation Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems (tr. Lucas Klein) published by New Directions, New York, 2012, was awarded ALTA’s 2013 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize and was shortlisted for the 2013 Best Translated Book Award in the USA. His second book from New Directions, Bloom and Other Poems, was published in 2022. Xi Chuan is described in the 2019 Poesiefestival Berlin booklet as ‘einer der großen Dichter der Gegenwart / one of the greats of contemporary poetry’.