The 9th Xu Zhimo Poetry and Arts Festival 15th of September, 2023

 Xu Zhimo has several names. He is most known as Xú Zhìmó (徐志摩; Wu IPA: ʑi tsɿ mu, Wu pinyin: Zhi Tsymu; Mandarin IPA: [ɕǔ ʈʂî mwǒ], Wades-Giles: Hsü Chih-mo), while he was born Xú Zhāngxù (徐章垿) with the courtesy name Yǒusēn (槱森). 

Xu was born in Haining, Zhejiang and graduated from Hangzhou High School, a well-known school in Southern China. He married Zhang Youyi in 1915 and attended Peiyang University in 1916 (now Tianjin University) to study law. In 1917, he moved to Peking University (PKU) due to the law department of Peiyang University merging into PKU. 

In 1918, he traveled to the United States to earn his bachelor's degree at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he took up a major in political and social sciences, along with a minor in history. Shortly afterward, he enrolled at Columbia University in New York to pursue a graduate degree in economics and politics in 1919. 

He left New York in 1921, having found the U.S. "intolerable", to go study in England at King's College, Cambridge, where he fell in love with English Romantic poetry like that of Keats and Shelley. He was also influenced by the French romantic and symbolist poets, some of whose works he translated into Chinese. 

In 1922 he returned to China and became a leading figure of the modern poetry movement. In 1923, he founded the Crescent Moon Society, a Chinese literary society that was part of the larger New Culture Movement, believing in "art for art's sake" and often engaging in running debates with the "art for politics' sake" (Chinese Communist Party-driven) League of the Left-Wing Writers. 

When the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore visited China, Xu Zhimo served as one of his oral interpreters. Xu used vernacular Chinese and translated Western romantic forms into modern Chinese poetry. He worked as an editor and professor at several schools before his death on 19 November 1931, dying in a plane crash near Jinan and Tai'an, Shandong while flying on a Stinson Detroiter from Nanjing to Beijing. 

He left behind four collections of verse and several volumes of translations from various languages. 

 An article about the event is here .                                                                                                                                         

Lily, Tim Yip and Alan Macfarlane, emeritus professor of anthropological science at the University of Cambridge and chairman of the festival

Hongyi Yang 

Ann Massing

Peter Hughes  

Nisha Ramayya 

Simon Marsh  

 Lucy Sheerman    

Rob Kiely        

 Alan Baker

 Vince Cable

Lily

Tim Yip Dress Design 

Oh, and we launched this little beauty!!!