("Zheng Dan Yi") has been compared with Rilke, Dylan Thomas and Tsvetaeva. Esteemed translator J.P. Seaton considers him one of "the leading Chinese poets of this century" while critics in China have long regarded him as one of the finest lyrical poets. Zheng has won prizes in New York (First Line inaugural prize) and in China (one of the nation's ten best poems in 1997, by Beijing Youth Daily).

He has been publishing poems since the 1980s, and novellas since the 1990s throughout his native China, and in Taiwan, Hong Kong and North America. Of his six poetry collections, the critically acclaimed Wings of Summer - Selected Poems of Zheng Danyi 1984 - 1997 (Sixth Finger Press: Hong Kong, 2003; a bilingual edition with translations by Luo Hui) is the most comprehensive volume.

Distinctions include winning First Line magazine's inaugural poetry prize (New York, 1991) and being anthologised in Ten Major Poets Today (Shanghai Literary and Art Press, 1993), Gold in Blue Sky (Foreign Language Press: Beijing, 1995) and New Generation: Poems from China Today (Hanging Loose Press: New York, 1999; editor Wang Ping). His poetry has appeared in Chinese and English in journals across Asia and North America, including Jintian/Today, Shanghai Literature Monthly, Unitas, Master, Hong Kong Literary Monthlyand Beacons.

Zheng has been a guest at the Hong Kong International Literary Festival and the Taipei Poetry Festival, and has given readings throughout China, USA and in Europe and the UK.

Born in Sichuan, Zheng has lectured in Chinese Literature and was a visiting scholar at Beijing University and the Social Science Institute of China. He now lives in Hong Kong.

"Zheng Danyi's poetry embodies a gleaming river of words and images that blend the inner self and the external world, idealism and fatalism, classic and personal symbols, in a charged, exquisite style."
-- Michelle Yeh / Xi Mi, University of California - Davis

"as you read the poems, they take you over with a complex through-line of emotion, images and subterranean logic that is transforming. It is almost like reading from a musical score"
-- Dino Mahoney, South China Morning Post

Also see:

Sixth Finger Press