New Chinese Writing & Poetry@Leeds

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

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.

There is an on-going dedicated blog thread, which has been curated and written by Chinese-English poetry 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.