Yang Lian　　 >>>>>Photos<<<<<

Yang Lian was born in Switzerland in 1955, and grew up in Beijing. He began writing when he was sent to the countryside in the 1970s. On his return to Beijing he became one of the first group of young ‘underground’ poets, who published the literary magazine Jintian. Yang Lian’s poems became well-known and influential inside and outside of China in the 1980s, especially when his poem ‘Norlang’ 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 Tian’anmen 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 seven selections of poems, two selections of prose and many essays in Chinese. His work has also been translated into more than twenty languages, including English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese and Eastern European languages.

Yang Lian was awarded the Flaiano International Poetry Prize (Italy, 1999) and his book Where the Sea Stands Still: New Poems won the title ‘Poetry Books Society Recommended Translation’ (UK, 1999). His three volumes of collected works, Yang Lian Zuo Pin 1982-1997 (2 vols) and Yang Lian Xin Zuo 1998-2002 have eventually been published in China. His most recent translations into English have been Yi, a book-length poem; Notes of a Blissful Ghost, a selection of poems; Concentric Circles, another book-lengh poem published by Bloodaxe Books in 2005; and Unreal City, a selection of poems and prose in English translation published by Auckland University Press in 2006.

'Yang Lian stretches poetic language to its linguistic extreme.'

- Orbis Quaeterly International Literary Journal (No1 34)

 

'Yang Lian's intricate, shocking and baroque masterpiece Concentric Circles is superbly rendered by Brian Holton with Agnes Chan.'

- W N Herbert: Book Of The Year, Scotland on Sunday

 

'Yang Lian is one of the most astonishing poets I've read for years. He has a westernist, modernist sensibility allied with an ancient Chinese, almost shamanistic one. He can both excite and frighten you - like MacDiarmid meets Rilke with Samurai sword drawn!'

- W.N. Herbert, Scotsman

 

'He continues his work bridging Chinese tradition to western modernism. The scope of his creative imagination is astoundingSYang Lian is one of the great world poets of our era'

- Klaus Rifberg, Edinburgh Review

 

'Yang Lian distinguishes himself in representing the pain of life caught in between historic eras...a new version of an old issue for world literature as well as Chinese literature is proposed: how to continue writing, relying on individual rather than enforced communal inspiration'

- Allen Ginsberg

 

'It wouldn't surprise me if he became a future Nobel Laureate. His style is one of extraordinary grandeur and ambitionSWithout question, the sequence Where the Sea Stands Still has a monumental drive, a sensuous strength and intellectual clarity; it could prove as enduring an achievement as Montale's Xenia or Elytis's The Axion Esti'

- David Morley, Stand