Xi Chuan

Xi Chuan (Chinese: 西川; born 1963), pen name of Liu Jun (Chinese: 刘军), is a poet, essayist, and translator. An author of experimental poetry and editor of underground poetry journals, his poems have been said to "carry a sense of the world’s plentitude and of the world’s puzzlement."

Xi Chuan was born in Xuzhou, Jiangsu province and raised in Beijing. He attended a foreign-languages school for diplomats, an unusual opportunity at a time when most schools were closed. From 1990 to 1995, he was one of the editors of the unofficial magazine Modern Han Poetry. ) Following these deaths and the failure of the Tiananmen Square protests that year, he barely wrote for two years. This break took his poetry from "condensed, numinous lyricism" combining classical Chinese influences with Western modernism to "meditative, expansive prose poems that dismantled the aestheticism and musicality of his previous self".

He teaches classical and modern Chinese literature at the Central Academy of Fine Arts and lives in Beijing, China. Before that, he had taught Western literature in Chinese translation and introductory English. He has held appointments at universities outside China like New York University and the University of Victoria. He has won prizes in China, Germany, and from UNESCO.

Awards

Modern Chinese Poetry Award, 1994 Lu Xun Prize for Literature, 2001 Zhuang Zhongwen Prize for Literature, 2003

Selected publications

Chinese Roses (Zhongguo de meigui, 1991) A Fictitious Family Tree (Xugou de jiapu,1997) A Secret Convergence (Yinmi de huihe, 1997) The Poetry of Xi Chuan (Xi Chuan shi xuan, 1997, reprinted as Xi Chuan de shi in 1999) Roughly Speaking (Dayi ruci, 1997) Selected Poems of Xi Chuan,1986-1996 (2002) Depths and Shallowness (Shenqian, 2006) Personal Preferences (Geren haowu, 2008) Notes on the Mosquito, translated by Lucas Klein into English, 2012 The Three from Peking University: Haizi, Luo Yihe, and Xi Chuan , Delufa Press, Rome (2025) translated by Francesco De Luca into Italian