Unveiling of Poetry on the Tram

About poets

Menna Elfyn (Wales, UK)

Menna Elfyn is an award-winning poet and playwright. She has published over twelve volumes of poetry including Aderyn Bach Mewn Llaw (Bird in Hand) (1990), the winner of the Welsh Arts Council prize for best volume of the year. Four volumes have appeared bilingually by Bloodaxe Books: Cell Angel (1996), Blind Man’s Kiss, (2001) and Perfect Blemish (2007) and her latest, Murmur, was chosen as Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation for autumn 2012. Her other works include libretti for various composers in Wales and America. She was co-librettist for ‘Garden of Light’, a choral symphony for the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in 1999 and more recently an oratorio for Welsh National Opera  ‘Gair ar Gnawd’ (Word on Flesh). She has also written numerous stage, radio and television plays and has a regular column in the national newspaper of Wales, The Western Mail, since 1995. She was made Poet Laureate for the Children of Wales in 2002-2003. She received the Foreign Poetry prize in Sardinia, Italy, in 2009 for her poetry and was also nominated for the Evelyn Encelot prize for European women poets. Her other awards include honourary Fellow of Literature Wales and Royal Literary Fellow at Aberystwyth University.  In 2009, she received an award from Arts Council Wales to write on ‘Sleep’. She is the most travelled and translated of all Welsh language poets and her work has been translated into 18 languages. She is Director of the Masters programme in Creative Writing at University of Wales, Trinity Saint David.

Olvido García Valdés (Spain)

Poet, essayist and translator, Olvido García Valdés was born on December 2, 1950 in Asturias, Spain. She holds degrees in Philosophy from the University of Valladolid, and Romance Philology from the University of Oviedo. She resides in Toledo, Spain.

Her poetry collections, except for her most recent Lo solo del animal (2012), have been published together in one volume Esa polilla que delante de mí revolotea (Poesía reunida 1982–2008). She has translated into Spanish Pier Paolo Pasolini’s poetry books, and translated in collaboration a wide anthology of Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva. Sheisalsoauthor of thebiographical essayTeresa de Jesús,texts for art catalogues, and numerous works of literary reflection. She was co-editor of the literary magazines Los Infolios and El signo del gorrión. Her poetry has been translated into many languages. Among other awards, in 2007 she was awarded the Premio Nacional de Poesía (National Poetry Prize) for her collection Y todos estábamos vivos (And we were all alive).

Lan Lan (China)

Born in 1967 in Yantai, Shandong Province, Lan Lan is considered one of the most influential contemporary Chinese lyrical poets. She is the bestselling author of nine poetry titles including Life with a Smile (1990), Songs of Romance (1993), Inner Life (1997), Dream, Dream (2003) and From Here, to Here (2008). Also a prolific prose and children’s fiction writer, her work is translated into ten languages. Awarded the prestigious Liu Li’an Poetry Prize in 1996, she was voted the top writer of the “Best Ten Female Poets.” In 2009, she received four of China’s highest literary honours: the “Poetry & People” Award, the Yulong Poetry Prize, the “Best Ten Poets in China” Award, and Bing Xin Children’s Literature New Work Award. A regular guest at international poetry festivals, she lives in Beijing.

Jeffrey Yang (USA)

Jeffrey Yang was born in 1974 in Escondido, California. He is the author of the poetry books Vanishing-Line (2011) and An Aquarium (2008, winner of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award), both published by Graywolf Press. An Aquarium was published by Berenberg Verlag in Germany in 2012, with a preface by Eliot Weinberger. Recently, one poem from Vanishing-Line was chosen to be a part of New York City’s Poetry in Motion program where it has been displayed in the city’s subways, trains, and taxis. His poems have been translated into seven languages. For the past twelve years Yang has worked as an editor at New Directions Publishing, and has edited two anthologies for the publishing house—Time of Grief: Mourning Poems and Birds, Beasts, and Seas: Nature Poems from New Directions. He is the translator of Liu Xiaobo’s June Fourth Elegies, Su Shi’s East Slope, and the collection of Tang and Song poems, the Qian Jia Shi, titled Rhythm 226. With the translator Natasha Wimmer, he edited the annual anthology of world literature, Two Lines: Some Kind of Beautiful Signal. Yang also works as an editor at the New York Review of Books, where he helped start their new NYRB/Poets series.

Adonis (Syria)

li Ahmad Said Esber, known to readers as Adonis, was born in a rural village in Syria in 1930.  He graduated with a degree in philosophy from Damascus University and went on to earn a doctoral degree in Arabic literature from St. Joseph University in Beirut.

Adonis has written more than fifty books of poetry, criticism, essays, and translation in his native Arabic.  He is recognized as one of the most important poets and theorists of literature in the Arab world, and one of the most important contemporary poets and thinkers in any language or context.  His influence on Arabic poetry can be compared with that of Pound or Eliot on poetry in English, combined, however, with a radical and secular critique of his society.

Adonis’s many awards include the International Poetry Forum Award (Pittsburgh, 1971), National Poetry Prize (Lebanon, 1974), Grand Prix des Biennales Internationales de la Poésie (Belgium, 1986), Prix de Poésie Jean Malrieu Étranger (France, 1991), Prix de la Méditerranée (France, 1994), Nazim Hikmet Prize (Turkey, 1994), Lerici-Pea Prize (Italy, 2000), Oweiss Cultural Prize (UAE, 2004), the BjØrnson Prize (Norway, 2007), the Zhong Kun International Poetry Prize (China, 2009) and the Goethe Literature Prize (German, 2011).  In 1997 the French government named him Commandeur de I’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

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