In the late spring of 2021, sponsored by the British Council , Accent Society launched a five-month international online poetry residency program, in collaboration with Jenny Niven and renowned Scottish poets Don Paterson, Jen Hadfield, and Sophie Collins. We have hosted nearly 20 interdisciplinary poetry workshops, roundtables, and collective creative activities.  Topics include Sign Language Poetry, Poetry and Art Curation, Electronic Music and Sound Poetry, and Poetry and Video Game Design, etc. During this period, the resident artists have together explored the craft and enchanting power of poetry. Despite the pandemic isolation, the online residency has provided  an incubator for community engagement, fostering friendships, collaborations, and poetic kinships.

As the grand finale of the residency program, the British Council has sponsored this Accent Accent International Poetry Award. The Award seeks submissions from writers, translators and artists across the globe. It aims to discover new creative voices, push the boundaries of poetry, and encourage cross-cultural engagement and radical hospitality. The award comprises four categories: Experimental Poetry Translation, Video Performance Poetry, Ekphrastic Poetry, and Emerging Voice. One winner and five honorary mentions will be selected for each of these categories. Each winner will be awarded a prize of ¥1000  and a candle trophy  (meaning ‘what is to give light must endure burning’) . In addition, all the winning works and honorary mentions will be presented in the future publications (in Chinese and/or English language), international poetry festivals, exhibitions, and promotional events hosted by Accent Society and its partner organizations  including Push the boat out  poetry festival in Edinburgh and Lightyears Poetry magazine in China.

The Accent Accent International Poetry Award is a competition that incorporates Chinese/English bilingual poetry writing, poetry translation, and interdisciplinary poetic works. The award is open to applicants of any nationality, age, and creative background. Certain categories have specific language requirements, please refer to the guidelines below. Collaborative works are accepted. Through this call for submissions, we hope to expand our horizon and chart the diverse landscapes of contemporary poetry across the world. We especially welcome entries from the historically underrepresented and marginalized voices in the poetry community. Poets of all stripes are welcome. We look forward to seeing established poets challenging themselves and the limits of the poetic form. We would also love to invite interdisciplinary artists to extend the potential of poetry with their unique perspectives and skills.

Unlike many literary awards, whose evaluation processes tend to be excuted behind closed doors, the Accent Accent International Poetry Award strives to expand the spirit of innovation and deterritorialization into its evaluation process. We view the evaluation process as a social experiment in which poetry is brought to the public. We hope to deconstruct and challenge the existing criteria and opacity of literary competitions. The evaluation process will take the form of  four online poetry workshop with our interdiplinary jury team members. The judges will thoroughly review, evaluate, vote, and discuss the submission of each category during the judging workshops, which will be live-streamed and invite audience participation.

Category A:  Award for Creative Translation

The Creative Translation Poetry Award is intended to reward poetry translations that exhibit experimental nature, excellent translation and creative writing skills.

• The applicant must first choose one of the English-language poems by Scottish poets listed below and translate it into Chinese for common translation purposes. In addition, the applicant should creatively adapt the original text into a new Chinese poem. (Applicants can freely define what is ‘creative translation’ for themselves).
  
  
• Please also attach a statement (around 400 words) that explains the connection between the original text, regular translation, and experimental translation.

[Poems for Translation]
>>Click Here to View the English Text

Judges

Translator, published works include Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, Welcome to the Monkey House, and The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan.

Editor, publisher, founder of Shanghe Zhuoyuan publishing house and Xingsi Culture

Professor of Chinese in University of California, Davis, as well as Chair of the UC Pacific Rim Research Program

Translator, a grave-digger of Auschwitz.

Researcher, translator, department chair of Chinese and Japanese at Vassar College. 

Poet., Lionmu Education CEO, bilingual poet, EDM producer . Author  of three poetry books.

Writer . Chinese ranslator of Sally Rooney’s three books. Her words can be found in The Margins, Lit Hub, A Public Space, The Shanghai Literary Review, The Millions. 

An epistemological quest by a fluctuating number of people with varied aims. Current spoons include Robert Currie, Anne Carson, Jinjin Xu, Angela Qian, Jiaoyang Li，Jenna Lanzaro, Amir Hall, Bayan A, Sara Ekamel, Will Walton, Charis Caputo, Joanna Acevedo,  Amanda K Larson.

Visual artist working in photography, text and video, full-time lecturer at Smith College. His works explore the paradox of intimacy and distance. He is the recipient of the PDN The Curator Award, Center Project Launch Award, and Royal Ulster Academy Portrait Prize.

Tingying Ma’s work has been presented at the Museum of Chinese in America, New York; International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP), New York; Ullens Center of Contemporary Art (UCCA), Beijing; Ming Contemporary Art Museum (MCAM), Shanghai.

Playwriter, theatre director, poet, short story writer, and literary translator. She’s the founder and artistic director of the Sound and Fury Play Reading Festival. She has written four collections of short stories and ten plays.

Script reader for the Atlanta Film Festival and the Jumpstart Screenplay Contest, Script analyst for Roadmap Writers. Her feature script ‘Just A Visit’ advanced to the second round of the Sundance Film Festival Development Track Program and was selected into the semi-finalists for the Filmmatic Horror Screenplay Award.

Poet, and visual artist currently based in New York.  She has received grants and support from New York Foundation For the Arts,  British Council, Foundation for the Comtemporary Arts,  Breadloaf Conference, The Performance Project at USS and others.  She was the poet in residency at Chashama gallery.

Writer, critic and curator. Song has won the Short Story Biennial Award and One-way Street Bookstore Literature Award – Best Fiction of the Year 2017. He has published eight novels and shory stories collections. 

Author of three poetry collections. His work has been translated into English, French, Spanish, Hindi, Swedish, and Japanese. He is editor in chief of Enclave, a poetry journal he founded in 2012.

Photographer, poet, writer,  He has successively won the Jiangnan Poetry Award, the Dongdangzi Poetry Award and other poetry awards. His works have been translated into 16 languages.

Poet, scholar, and photographer.  He received PhD from Yale University , currently serves as  a professor at National Chengchi University（Tai Wan)

Poet, curator, researcher, PhD candidate of Fudan University

Poet and photographer. Her poems has been published in local and international poetry anthologies and poetry magazines like Perfil, Today and most recently El Brillo en Las Gavillas de Aarroz: Mujeres Poetas de China Contemporánea.

Bingual poet, literary translator and scholar in medieval literature. Her research interests include Old and Middle English literature, textual-pictorial engagement in medieval manuscripts, and literary cartography

 Poet,  translator/editor and interdisciplinary artist. she has won Rougang Poetry Prize (Rougang Poetry Foundation, 2019), Weiming Poetry Prize (Peking University, 2015), Chongchang Poetry Prize (Nanjing University, 2015) among others.

Poet and editor, winner of  the Frontier Poetry Chapbook Prize and was published in the Spring of 2019, co-Editor-in-Chief of the Beijing-based Spittoon Literary Magazine, Art Director and Editor at Tokyo Poetry Journal, Blog Editor at Asymptote Journal, and Poetry Editor at Cicada. 

Jay Gao

Chinese Scottish poet and MFA student at Brown University. He is the author of three poetry pamphlets: Wedding Beasts (2019), Katabasis (2020), and TRAVESTY58 (2022). He is a Contributing Editor for The White Review.

Yuki Tanaka

Winner of the 2018 Frost Place Chapbook Contest by the book Séance in Daylight (Bull City Press), professor at Hosei University in Tokyo.

The recipient of the Joy Harjo Poetry Award and Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize.  He is the author of Burying the Mountain (copper canyon press 2021)