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Yang Lian was one of the original Misty Poets who reacted against the strictures of the Cultural Revolution. Born in Switzerland, the son of a diplomat, he grew up in Beijing and began writing when he was sent to the countryside in the 1970s. On his return he joined the influential literary magazine Jintian (Today). His work was criticised in China in 1983 and formally banned in 1989 when he organised memorial services for the dead of Tiananmen while in New Zealand. He was a Chinese poet in exile from 1989 to 1995, finally settling in London in 1997, also living for some periods in Berlin. Translations of his poetry include five collections with Bloodaxe, Where the Sea Stands Still (1999), Concentric Circles (2005), Lee Valley Poems (2009), Narrative Poem (2017) and A Tower Built Downwards (2023), as well as his long poem Yi (Green Integer, USA, 2002), Anniversary Snow (Shearsman, 2019), and Riding Pisces: Poems from Five Collections (Shearsman, 2008), a compilation of earlier work. He is co-editor with W.N. Herbert of Jade Ladder: Contemporary Chinese Poetry (Bloodaxe Books, 2012), and was awarded the International Nonino Prize in 2012. Both Where the Sea Stands Still and Narrative Poem are Poetry Book Society Recommended Translations.
Those lonely Tang dynasty poets may be Yang's original blues brothers, but he's as much a modernist and symbolist in the vein of Mallarme or Rimbaud [...] Yang Lian's work is rooted not in geography but in his own imagination [...] to exist in Yang's lines can be a gorgeous but frustrating adventure. -- Tim Kindseth * Time Magazine * Repressive regimes tend to have little problem acknowledging poets' power to shape our opinions and our world. Some of those they exile settle in Britain. Yang Lian, a leading member of China's Tiananmen generation, has just published his autobiographical masterpiece Narrative Poem in translation... A kind of wild lyricism marks the work... a sense of the explosive urgency of writing itself. -- Fiona Sampson * The i Paper * Yang Lian is one of the most ambitious poets writing in Chinese today - indeed, one of the most ambitious poets writing in any language... Narrative Poem represents a stunning achievement of both poet and translator, bringing the two together almost as one. -- Lucas Klein * Translation and Literature *
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