Started in 2009, IPNHK is one of the most influential international poetry events in Asia. In its ten-year anniversary in November 2019, 30 famous poets from various countries will be in Hong Kong and ten cities in China afterwards to read their works based on the theme "Speech and Silence." Jan Wagner (Germany) was born in Hamburg and has been living in Berlin since 1995. Poet, essayist, translator of Anglo-American poetry (Charles Simic, James Tate, Simon Armitage, Matthew Sweeney, Robin Robertson and many others), Wagner has published seven collections of poetry and his works have been translated into more than thirty languages.

Self-Portrait with a Swarm of Bees, to be published in Arc's flagship translation series 'Visible Poets', combines the poet's unerring instinct for the surprising perspective on commonplace objects or events - plants, animals, landscapes- with a mischievous delight in the detail of the absurd, the precarious balance. Wagner is a vigilant, yet playful, chronicler of the quotidian, his meticulous handling of image and sound forging a worldly, almost luminous palpability. Intensely curious, constantly attentive to novel or unanticipated possibilities afforded by traditional forms, Wagner's poems celebrate what he has called 'our steaming, glowing, odorous, noisy world'.