Xia Leon Sloane (b. 2000) is a composer and poet currently completing their Master at the Royal Northern College of Music. Emerging from literature, queer issues, and in particular the environmental crisis, their work engages with the interplay between spiritual practice and activism. In particular, they seek to connect more deeply with the sacredness of nature, as well as its growing fragility in the face of ecological crisis, and to create work which responds from this place of intimate connection. As an artist, Xia seeks to reconnect audiences to nature, thereby hoping to act as a springboard for positive change, to its beauty and how much we have to lose, and to emotions surrounding all of this which can so easily become buried beneath the cold statistics and dire predictions presented to us on a regular basis. Their poetry tends to be intense in its sensory imagery.

In 2015, Xia self-published their first poetry anthology, hushed skies, at the age of 15.  Their poetry collection mermaids need to feed their children, compiled in 2018, is also self-published on their website, together with a number of their musical scores.

In 2019, the BBC commissioned Xia to write for the vocal octet VOCES8 and their composition, Earthward, for which they wrote the words as well as the music, received its Premiere at Cadogan Hall at the BBC Proms. Over the coming years, Xia hopes to develop their poetry and academic writing alongside their compositional work.

Xia’s poems Flood Warning and Spring are published by Arachne in our 2021 Solstice Shorts anthology Words From the Brink.