BIRGIT BUNZEL LINDER was born and raised in Oberhausen, an industrial city in the Ruhr Valley. She left Germany in the 1980s, and has since lived in Taiwan, China, America, and now lives in Hong Kong. She teaches Chinese and Comparative Literary Studies at the City University of Hong Kong. Her life has been marked by frequent moves and many travels, and by inscriptions from different places, cultures, and people, which also reveal themselves in her first collection of poetry, Shadows in Deferment. Birgit Linder has previously published poems in Mad Poets Review, Clockwise Cat, Kavya Bharati, Cerebration, International Literary Quarterly, and Asian Cha. Besides writing, she likes painting, reading, and photography.

SHADOWS IN DEFERMENT won the International Proverse Prize 2012. It is an accomplished first collection of poetry, beautifully self-illustrated.

 “In The Longest Journey, E. M Forster writes of ‘the union of shadow and adamant that men call poetry’. At her best, Linder is able to realize this impossible pairing, endowing the unbearable lightness of words with enduring diamond force.” — Simon Patton, literary translator and poet.

“Birgit Linder’s Shadows in Deferment conveys tremendous range in the service of a poetic intention which, across an impressive body of work, holds her reader fast.” — Stuart Christie, Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, Hong Kong Baptist University.

 “Birgit Linder offers a collection of deeply engaged and engaging poems, labyrinthine paths to track and weave. Behind these poems: a bricoleur’s appetite and passion for life. Behind the passion: there’s no doubt, a determined, curious and luminous mind.” — Mary-Jane Newton, author of Unlocking and Of Symbols Misused.

Birgit Linder was the featured author at the Proverse Readers' Club, Dymocks Books and Cafe, Discovery Bay, Hong Kong, on 30 January 2016.

Well attended by an appreciative and responsive audience, the session morphed into the cafe section of the bookshop around the corner into a literary cafe.