Yang Lian

Born 1955 in Swietzerland. Grew up in Beijing. One of the founders of the ‘Misty’ school of contemporary Chinese poetry. His poems became well-known and influential inside and outside of China in the 1980s, especially when his sequence ‘Norilang’ was criticized by the Chinese government during the ‘Anti-Spiritual Pollution’ movement. Yang Lian was invited to visit Australia and New Zealand in 1988 and became a poet in exile after the Tiananmen massacre. Since that time, he has continued to write and speak out as a highly individual voice in world literature, politics and culture. Yang Lian has published twelve collections of poems, two collections of prose and many essays in Chinese. His work has also been translated into more than thirty languages, including English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese and Arabic. Yang Lian is an award-winning poet worldwide and has also been invited to be a writer-in-residence by many international institutions.