INFORMATION

Genre(s): Poetry / Translation

Location: Vancouver, Washington

Birthplace: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada (b. 1974)

Neil Aitken is a writer and a scholar who has moved between languages in childhood and adulthood, learning, forgetting, and relearning both English and Mandarin Chinese, Growing up in Canada, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, and the United States, he has always been interested in exile and dislocation. He is the author of two collections of poetry: The Lost Country of Sight (Anhinga, 2008) which won the Philip Levine Prize, and Babbage’s Dream (Sundress, 2016) which was long-listed for the Anthony Hecht Prize. His work explores displacement, elegy, language, technology, history, and memory. He is the founding editor of Boxcar Poetry Review, the curator of Have Book Will Travel, and the podcast host of The Lit Fantastic.

As a Chinese-English translator, Neil has worked with poet-translator Ming Di to translate The Book of Cranes: Selected Poems of Zang Di(Vagabond 2015) as well as many of Ming Di’s own first selected poems, which were published as The River Merchant’s Wife. His co-translations of Jiang Hao, Jiang Li, Jiang Tao, Lü De’an, Lü Yue, Sun Wenbo, and Zang Di are also prominently featured in New Cathay: Contemporary Chinese Poetry, 1990-2012 (Tupelo 2013). He was awarded the DJS Translation Prize in 2011 and serves as a contributing editor and board member of Poetry East West.