Singing Grass is a business consultancy advising on access and development strategies for the Chinese market. We develop bespoke programmes for clients in the arts, lifestyle, cultural and luxury retail sectors to connect them to their markets.
We are pleased to share a message from Liu Zhenyun to translators around the world who took part in this year’s Voices of Today Literary Translation Prize.
Reflecting on the emotional connections beneath language, his words offer a powerful reminder of what translation carries across cultures.
We are entering the “emotional economy,” where consumption is driven less by status and more by connection, reassurance and shared experience.
In this piece, Alicia Liu and Shilpa Saul explore how shifting consumer behaviour is reshaping global brands, cultural trends and the way ideas travel across markets.
From social media “Instapoetry” to 180,000-copy translation successes in China, poetry is re-emerging in unexpected forms. Drawing on insights from BolognaBookPlus, Alicia Liu explores how poetry is evolving across markets, from Instapoetry and social platforms to global translation success stories, and what this means for publishers navigating an age of emotional and cultural flux.
At the 2026 London Book Fair, Singing Grass celebrated a historic milestone: the induction of Chinese master Mai Jia into the Penguin Modern Classics collection. Discover why his work is redefining the global crime genre.
Singing Grass and Paper Republic have joined forces to find the next generation of literary translators of contemporary voices
Satire, style and the spiritual esprit that underpins the human race, is examined in exquisite detail by the prize winning contemporary Chinese novelist, Liu Zhenyun whose novels embrace the absurdity of people while offering a philosophical slant on the who, what, when and why of what makes the humble human tick. His latest novel Salty Jokes: Am I Supposed to Laugh? has taken China by storm.
Emotional Economy: Reverse Cultural Flow is Reshaping Global Consumer Culture. At Singing Grass we are exploring how this reverse cultural flow will impact publishing, licensing, brand building and cross-market collaboration — and what organisations need to understand to respond meaningfully.
Three of China’s fastest-rising billionaires in 2025 come from toys, tea and tech - not property.
As part of Singing Grass’s ongoing efforts to foster international publishing exchange, we curated a training programme for a Chinese academic publishing delegation to visit three key institutions in Paris — Syndicat national de l’édition (SNE), Editis Publishing Group, and KEDGE Business School.
