Born in 1961, Nanjing, Han Dong is an important avant-garde poet as well as an essayist, fiction writer, editor of non-official poetry journals, and blogger. His first novel was translated as Banished! (University of Hawai'i Press, 2009) and long-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize, 2008.

Han Dong's poems break new ground with their repudiation of high culture and other heroics. He creates subtle, deceptively "simple" verse and takes pleasure in puncturing pomposity and debunking political myths. His poems are also funny, rude, often sexy, and highly visual. In 2009, he won the Judges' Prize at an independent poetry festival held in Yunnan, China.