Chinese Writers’ Residency

The Chinese Writers’ Residency Program aims to create opportunities for exchange among Chinese writers, translators, publishers, and students to enhance the quality of translation and increase awareness of Chinese culture in Italy. The program is supported by Jing Bartz, (WePro Consulting & Management UG, Hamburg) and the Centre for Language Education and Cooperation (RPC).

The program includes a translation workshop for Ca’ Foscari students and several public events, with the participation of Italian translators and the Italian publisher of the writer. The activities aim to stimulate interest in Chinese literature among students and enhance their translation skills through a translation workshop led by professionals and instructors, involving the publisher who will publish the translated (unpublished) text. The program also reaches out to the public with events at Venice bookstores featuring the writer and the publisher. The writer will deliver a lecture at the host university and participate in educational and other activities, as well as potential literary events.

This year’s selected writer is Xia Jia, a Chinese literature professor at Xi’an Jiaotong University and the author of numerous science fiction works. Among them, the collection of short stories titled Spring Festival (Future Fiction, 2015) is available in Italian. The writer will reside in Venice for two weeks and subsequently visit Naples and Rome, where she will engage in activities for students and the general public.
In particular, Xia Jia will participate on November 7 in a conversation with Nicoletta Pesaro and Federico Picerni, and in a roundtable discussion on the translation and publication of science fiction literature with translators Lorenzo Andolfatto and Chiara Cigarini, and publisher Francesco Verso from Future Fiction (November 9). Both events are open to the public. She will be a guest on November 10 and 12 at Karass, a bookstore specialising in genre literature and East Asian literatures, where she will meet Venice readers and citizens. Finally, from November 13 to 17, she will collaborate on a workshop on the translation of one of her stories, led by professors Nicoletta Pesaro and Chiara Cigarini. The workshop aims to translate a story that will be published by Future Fiction
The program coordinator is Professor Nicoletta Pesaro.

In the past, the program was carried out in Ca’ Foscari University Venice, with the support of the local Confucius Institute in 2017 and 2018, with writers Su Tong and Ye Zhaoyan participating in the respective editions.