Lan Lan

Born in 1967 in Yantai, Shandong Province, China, began publishing when she was 14. Twelve of her poetry collections have appeared in Mandarin, among which are Serenade, Psalter and Selected Poems. Her five essay collections include The Book of Water, Night Has a Face and I’m Someone Else. Among her full length children’s books are City of Dreams, Run, Big Tree and The Tank Captain’s Tilted Hat.
Her work has been translated into English, French, Russian, Spanish, German, Japanese, Greek, Belgian, Croatian, and Portuguese, and published in various international journals. Her many awards include the Liu Li’an Poetry Prize, the Poetry and People’s Annual Poet Prize, the New Writings Prize for Bingxin Children’s Literature, and the Yu Long Poetry Prize. She has also been named one of China’s New Century Top Ten Young Women Poets. Her translated poetry has appeared in numerous venues outside China, including Copper Canyon’s 2011 anthology Push Open the Window: Contemporary Poetry from China; a Zephyr Press bilingual collection, Canyon in the Body; Published the Russian poetry collection The Cup of Songs, the English poetry collection Lan Lan’s Poems；and in Pangolin House, the international journal of Chinese & English-language poetry, The Work of the Poets, a collection of Spanish-language poetry published in Chile.
The poet enjoys a particularly close relationship with Greece, where she was a featured participant in the 2013 Athens International Poetry Festival. In 2014, she was named an honorary citizen of Chios. A member of the Henan Literature Institute, Lan Lan has also served as Poet-in-Residence at Beijing’s Renmin University. From Here to Here, a collection of her new and selected poems, recently assembled and translated into English under a U.S. National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, currently awaits publication.