Vessels by Ningli Deng: Coming in 2027

Over at Wind&Bones Books we are thrilled to announce that VESSELS, an exquisitely beautiful poetry collection by Chinese poet Ningli Deng, is forthcoming in 2027.

Intense and textured, Ningli Deng’s poems explore some of the largest of questions through the smallest of details — a jar of greengages, a cup, scaled fish, the spiny shell of jackfruit sliced open to reveal the muscular flesh beneath. This first book-length collection of Deng’s poems in English is published in a bilingual Simplified Mandarin / English edition. Wind&Bones Books co-director Will Buckingham is the translator of this gorgeous collection.

Ningli Deng is a poet, novelist, and translator based in Zhuhai, China. She is the translator of Jane Hirshfield’s Nine Gates: Entering The Mind of Poetry and the edited collection, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales (Penguin Books). Her work has appeared in Shanghai Culture, West Lake, and Sinan Literary Selection, among other literary journals.

I met Ningli back in 2023 when I ran a project called Dragon Carving for Writers. It was a British Council funded project exploring cross-cultural creativity in the UK, Hong Kong, China and beyond.

During the project we explored Liu Xie’s medieval Chinese classic the Wenxin diaolong (文心雕龍), or The Heart of Literature, the Carving of Dragons.

Liu’s book is a masterpiece of literary theory; but it is also more than this. It is an insightful and incisive philosophy of creativity. At Wind&Bones books, we take our name from the chapter in the Wenxin diaolong on “wind and bones” (風骨).

As part of the project we commissioned six new works of literature, to be translated and published in both English and Chinese. It was then that Will and I fell hopelessly in love with Ningli’s poetry.

I'm so excited to have this collection out in the world and I'm sure that you’ll love it just as much as Will and I do!

Pre-orders for VESSELS will be opening soon so stay tuned.