Poet Mai Van Phan is the author of 13 volumes of poetry, many of which were translated into 24 foreign languages.
The award presentation ceremony will take place at the Temple of Literature – Van Mieu Quoc Tu Giam – in Hanoi on December 1 with the presence of Cikada Prize Chairman Lars Vargo, the Swedish Ambassador to Vietnam, and representatives from the Vietnamese Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism and European cultural agencies in Hanoi.

Previously, in 2015 Vietnamese poet Y Nhi won the illustrious prize.
Mai Van Phan was born in 1955 in northern Ninh Binh Province. He has published 14 volumes of poetry, a book of essays, and English and French translations of his poetry collections. He has won numerous domestic literature awards for his works.
Established in 2004 on the centenary of Swedish Nobel laureate Harry Martinson's birth, the Cikada prize is awarded every year to an East Asian poet who "in his/her poems shows poetic sensitivity for the inviolability of life."
Share with Nhandan, Phan said, in his opinion, in order to promote Vietnamese poetry to international readers, it is essential to create high quality translations, conveying the right meaning of the original text. However, the poets should accept the variation of the verbal meanings and even the form between linguistic texts for the same poems. For example, several Vietnamese translators changed the style of poetry produced by A. S. Pushkin and P. Neruda to 'luc bat', a Vietnamese verse form of alternating six and eight syllables.