Lloyd Haft (1946) is an American-born Dutch poet, translator and sinologist. In 1968 he graduated from Harvard College and moved to Leiden to complete his MA in 1973 and his PhD in 1981. From 1973 to 2004 he taught Chinese language and literature, mostly poetry, at Leiden University.
He has widely translated poetry into English from the Dutch and the Chinese, including works by Gerrit Kouwenaar, Anna Enquist, HH ter Balkt, Lo Fu, Yang Lingye, Bian Zhilin and Zhou Mengdie.
Since the 1980s he has also been active as a poet writing in Dutch and English. He was awarded the Jan Campert Prize for his 1993 bilingual volume Atlantis (Querido, 1993) and the Ida Gerhardt Prize for his 2003 Dutch free-verse readings of the Psalms (republished by Vesuvius in 2011).
His latest book of poetry in Dutch is Intocht (Introit), issued by the American Book Center in June 2018. His recent translations include Herman Gorter: Selected Poems (Arimei 2021) and Zhou Mengdie: 41 Poems (Azoth 2022).
After early retirement in 2004, for a number of years Lloyd Haft spent much of his time in Taiwan with his wife Katie Su. In June 2019 he was named a Distinguished Alumnus of National Taiwan Normal University. In addition to writing and translating, his interests include Song-dynasty philosophy and taiji quan.
The publisher and assistant published have worked closely with Lloyd Haft on his remarkable translation of Gerrit Kouwenaar’s masterpiece Totally White Room.
