Shi Cheng: City Stories from China

Contact: commapublications@yahoo.co.uk

The official Manchester launch

Featuring Han Dong and Nicky Harman.

To mark the publication of Shi Cheng: Short Stories from Urban China - the Confucius Institute and Comma Press are delighted to host an evening with one of the key figures in contemporary Chinese literature.

Han Dong was born in Nanjing in 1961, studied at Shandong University, and subsequently taught philosophy in Xi'an and Nanjing. He began writing in 1980, and has been a major player on the modern Chinese literary scene since the 1990s, as a poet and editor of the magazine, Them. He is well-known as one of China's most important avant-garde poets, and is becoming increasingly influential as an essayist, short story writer and novelist.

Nicky Harman’s translations include Zhang Ling’s prizewinning novel Gold Mountain Blues, Xinran’s Message from Unknown Chinese Mothers, and Xinran’s China Witness (with Esther Tyldesley and Julia Lovell). She is active on the literary website, PaperRepublic.org, and has been Translator-in-Residence at the Free Word Centre, London. She has also recently edited A Phone Call from Dalian (Zephyr Press), a selection of translated poems by Han Dong.

For more info, see here. www.commapress.co.uk/?section=events>

Entry: Free

Time: 7:00pm