Yang Lian was born in in 1955, and grew up in . His poems became well-known and influential inside and outside of in the 1980s, especially when his sequence ‘Norilang’ was published in 1983.

Yang Lian was invited to visit and New Zealand in 1988 and next year, he started his journey through out the global. Since then, Yang Lian has published eleven collections of poems, two collections of prose and one selection of essays in Chinese. His work has also been translated into more than thirty languages, including English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese and many Eastern European languages. His most representative works including the long poems such as Yi, Where the Sea Stands Still, Concentric Circles and The Narrative Poem, and have been reviewed as "like MacDiarmid meets Rilke with Samurai sword drawn!", "one of the most representative voices of ". Yang Lian and the English poet W. N. Herbert edited Jade Ladder, a new Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Poetry in English (Bloodaxe, 2012), and The Third Shore, the anthology of Chinese – English poets’ mutual translation (Shearsman, 2013).

Among other awards, in 2012, Yang Lian has won Nonino International Literature Prize in , the juries of the prize were presided by V S Naipaul. In 2013, he won “Tian Duo” (Heavenly Bell) prize for the long poem in China. In 2014, he won The International Capri Prize 2014, an internationally well-known poetry prize in Italy. Yang Lian has been invited to become a member of The Norwegian Academy for Literature and Freedom of Expression in 2013.

Leng Shuang (born in 1973) is a poet and literature teacher working at the School of Literature, Journalism and Communication in Minzu University of China after receiving his PhD degree of literature from Peking University in 2006. His first collection of poems Fog in our age was published in 2008, some of which had been translated into English, Spanish, German and Japanese etc., and won a few poetry prize such as Liu Li’an prize for poetry (2010) and Poetry Construction Prize(2013). He has translated some poems of John Berryman, Philip Larkin， Philippe Jaccottet and Southern African modern poet Keorapetse Kgositsile etc. into Chinese.

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Víctor Rodríguez Núñez (Havana, 1955) is a poet, journalist, literary critic, translator, and scholar. Among his books of poetry are Cayama (1979), Con raro olor a mundo (1981), Noticiario del solo (1987), Cuarto de desahogo (1993), Los poemas de nadie y otros poemas (1994), El último a la feria (1995), Oración inconclusa (2000), Actas de medianoche I (2006), Actas de medianoche II (2007), tareas (2011), reversos (2011), deshielos (2013), and desde un granero rojo (2013). Anthologies of his work have come out in , , Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, and , most recently Cuarto de desahogo (2013), desde un granero rojo: poesía reciente (2014), and El mundo cabe en un alejandrino (2015). Book-length translations of his work have been published in English, French, Italian, Macedonian, Serbian and Swedish, and a wide selection of his poems has appeared in another twelve languages. He has been invited to read his work in more than thirty countries. His most recent publications in English are With a Strange Scent of World: Early Poems (Diálogos, 2014) and thaw (Arc Publications, 2013). Translations into English of his work have appeared in Asymptote, The Brooklyn Rail InTranslation, Circumference, Denver Quarterly, The Kenyon Review, Mid-American Review, New England Review, New Letters, The New York Quarterly, and Poetry, among many others. His poetry has long been the recipient of major awards throughout the Spanish-speaking world, including the David (Cuba, 1980), the Plural (Mexico, 1983), the EDUCA (Costa Rica, 1995); and in Spain, the Renacimiento (2000), the Fray Luis de León (2005), the Leonor (2006), the Rincón de la Victoria (2010), the Jaime Gil de Biedma (2011), and the Alfons el Magnànim (2013). In the eighties, he was the editor of Cuba’s leading cultural magazine, El Caimán Barbudo, where he published numerous articles on literature and film. He has compiled three anthologies that define his poetic generation, as well as another of 20th century Cuban poetry, La poesía del siglo XX en Cuba (2011). He has brought out various critical editions, introductions, and essays on Spanish American poets. With Katherine M. Hedeen, he has translated poetry from Spanish into English (Juan Gelman and José Emilio Pacheco, among others) and from English into Spanish (Mark Strand and John Kinsella, among others). He co-edits the Latin American Poetry in Translation series for the British publisher Salt. He divides his time between Gambier, Ohio, where he is currently Professor of Spanish at Kenyon College, and Havana, Cuba.

Jonas Modig was born 1943 in Stockholm, . He published a collection of poems 1968, called En sorts fattning (Norstedt) and then has been the CEO of the Swedish Publisher´s Association, the Swedish Book-of-the Month club, publishing house Wahlström & Widstrand and Bonnier Books Sweden. After he retired from the above job, he came back to his poetry writing and published Annandagar in 2007 (Norstedt), which focused on the death of my youngest son in the tsunami catastrophe. After that he published continuously Radfall (2009), Vinter i sommarhuset (2011) and Kaninen rymde (2014). Together with his wife Maria Modig he have published Dagblad (publisher Langenskiölds) 2005. Jonas Modig was the winner of literary prize from Samfundet De Nio 2015.

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Ilma Rakusa (*1946) studied Slavic and French Literature in Zurich, Paris and St. Petersburg. After her dissertation on the motif of loneliness in Russian literature, she debuted with her first book of poems "As in winter" (1977). She has published numerous poetry collections, short stories, prose books, as well as essays. She translates from Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Hungarian and French. Ilma Rakusa has for many years been a teacher at the University of Zurich and a prominent patron and advocate for Eastern European literature in the German speaking world and beyond. She contributes to major newspapers, such as Neue Zürcher Zeitung and Die Zeit. Her work has been widely celebrated and translated into 20 languages. She received many literature prizes, incl. Petrarca Award for Translation (1990), Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding (1998), Adelbert-von-Chamisso-Preis (2003) and Swiss Book Award (2009). She is a member of the German Academy for Language and Literature. Today, Ilma Rakusa lives in Zurich, Switzerland.

Shen Haobo is a Chinese poet and publisher, born in 1976 in Taixing, Jiangsu province. He graduated from the Chinese department of Beijing Normal University in 1999. Shen Haobo began publishing and writing poetry in 1996 and had his first official publication in 1998 with "Who was joking on 1990s"(谁在 拿90年代开涮). He is identified with the “Lower Body Poets” and the Post 70s Generation. Shen Haobo founded publishing company Xiron in 2001, which became one of the largest private-owned publishing companies in China. It buys the rights to books from established publishing houses and republishes for a discounted price in great quantities. Xiron published Chun Sue's "Beijing Doll".

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