The Cosmopolitan Race

• TANKA


  Composed of five lines of 31 syllables (5,7,5,7,7 syllables in each line)
• CHŌKA


  Narrative poem with alternating five and seven syllable lines, others have 150 lines
• HAIKU


  Unrhymed Japanese poem linked to human nature, consisting of 17 (5,7,5) syllables
• Characteristics of Modern Japanese literature:
• Yoko Tawada


  • Author of the award-winning Memoirs of a Polar Bear, The Last Children of Tokyo, and the short story Time Differences
• Tomoka Shibasaki


  • Known for her ability to capture situations with sharp, photograph-like accuracy, author of Spring Garden
• Sayaka Murata


  • Became popular with the translation of her novel Convenience Store Woman and short story A Clean Marriage
• Toshiki Okada


  • Playwright, theatre director, and winner of the Kenzaburo Oe Prize, author of The End of the Moment We Had
• Characteristics of Modern Chinese Literature:
• Ge Fei


  • One of the first and most influential avant-garde writers of China, author of the Jiangnan Trilogy and the novella The Invisibility Cloak
• Bi Feiyu


  • Started writing novels in the 1980s, author of The Moon Opera and Three Sisters
• Yang Hongbing


  • One of present-day China's most influential writers of children's literature, has written more than 80 fairy tales, children's novels and essays
• Dong Xi


  • Has published several novels, some of which have been translated into English, such as Help, Our Father and Life Without Language
• The May Fourth Movement (1917-1921) launched an era where vernacular Chinese was for the first time accepted as a legitimate poetic voice
• Vernacular poetry has continued to blossom in poetry journals and in cyberspace
• Characteristics of Modern Chinese poetry

  Depends on end rhyme and tonal metre for its cadence, characterized by its compactness and brevity, no epics of either folk or literary variety and hardly any narrative or descriptive poems that are long by the standards of world literature, stressing the lyrical, refrains from being exhaustive, marking instead the heights of ecstasies and inspiration or the depths of sorrow and sympathy
• Meifu Wang


  • Chief editor and co-translator of 21st Century Chinese Poetry, editor and co-translator of 21st Century Chinese Poetry, poet, recipient of a 2013 Henry Luce Foundation Fellowship for Chinese poetry translation and appointed by Ningxia Province Poetry Society as its contracted literary translator
• Dinah Roma-Sianturi


  • Associate professor of literature and the director of the De La Salle University's Bienvenido N. Santos Creative Writing Center (Manila), author of the poetry collections A Feast Of Origins and Geographies of Light
• Fran Drescher: 'I've gone very far, far away, but my character keeps me close to home.'