Yang Lian: Longing for Freedom in Unbreakable Ancient Chinese Poetry
– China
Yang Lian (楊煉) is a Swiss-Chinese poet, born in Bern in 1955. He grew up in Beijing. The Cultural Revolution intervened in his life in 1966, and in 1974 he was sent to the countryside for "re-education work", where he spent the next three years. It was there that he began to write poetry in the traditional Chinese style, which was forbidden by Mao Zedong's regime. In the early 1980s, he was politically persecuted for his poetry, but managed to avoid arrest thanks to friends. In 1989, he moved to New Zealand as a visiting scholar by invitation, from where he became involved in protests against the Tiananmen Square massacre. His work was banned and two of his books were shredded. Since then he has lived in exile, first in New Zealand, then in Britain, and now alternately in London and Berlin. He has published some two dozen collections of poetry in English, many of which have been translated into a number of languages.