Chuan Xi

Xi Chuan (Xi Čuan) Chinese poet, essayist and translator, born in 1963 in Jiangsu Province and raised in Beijing, where he still lives and teaches classical Chinese literature. He is one of the most influential contemporary Chinese poets. In his youth, he was regarded as a “post-Misty” poet; following the tragic loss of two close poet friends in 1989, including the legendary Hai Zi, he fell silent for three years before reinventing himself as a writer of expansive, meditative prose poems. American writer Eliot Weinberger described him as a “polymath” equally at home discussing the latest American poetry and Shang dynasty numismatics. He has translated Pound, Borges and Miłosz into Chinese. He received the Lu Xun Literary Award in 2001 and Sweden’s Cikada Prize in 2018. His poetry has been translated into English by Lucas Klein, including the collections Notes on the Mosquito and Bloom.