Please join us for a reading by celebrated visiting poet Xi Chuan, one of the most influential and important contemporary Chinese poets. His poetry has been widely translated, including his collection in English Notes on the Mosquito, published by New Directions in 2012. Xi will be joined at this reading by Giramondo poets Kate Fagan and Lachlan Brown.
Tuesday 28 November 2017
6.30 pm for 7 pm
Knox Street Bar
21 Shepherd St, Chippendale, NSW
“Xi Chuan’s surprising poems reach into tight corners of mind and matter, impersonal but intimate, new to be heard but also oddly familiar.“
– Gary Snyder
Xi Chuan (西川) is a multi-award winning Chinese poet, essayist and translator. Previously a visiting adjunct professor at New York University, an Orion visiting artist at University of Victoria, Canada, and professor of Chinese literature at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, he is currently a professor of Beijing Normal University. Xi Chuan has published nine collections of poems, including Depth and Shallowness (2006) and A Dream’s Worth (2013), two books of essays and two 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 work has been widely anthologised and translated, and published in more than twenty countries. His 2012 book of poems in English translation, Notes on the Mosquito (New Directions, tr. Lucas Klein), was awarded ALTA’s 2013 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize and was shortlisted for American 2013 Best Translated Book Award.
Kate Fagan is a prominent Australian innovative poet whose third book First Light (Giramondo, 2012) was short-listed for both the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and the Age Book of the Year Award. She is the Convenor of the English Major at Western Sydney University and a former editor of How2, the U.S.-based journal of poetry and poetics. In 2017 she travelled to Guangzhou to participate in the 4th China Australia Literary Forum. Kate is also an established folk-roots musician and songwriter whose album Diamond Wheel won the National Film and Sound Archive Award for Folk Recording. She supported Joan Baez on her 2013 tour of Australia/NZ.
Lachlan Brown grew up in Macquarie Fields in South West Sydney. His first collection of poems, Limited Cities (Giramondo, 2012), was commended for the Mary Gilmore Award. His second collection, Lunar Inheritance, was published by Giramondo in 2017. His poems have appeared in Best Australian Poems, Southerly, Antipodes, St Marks Review, Cordite, HEAT and Relief. He teaches literature at Charles Sturt University.