Duo Duo

China’s finest poet, Duo Duo was born in 1951 in Beijing—with the name Li Shizheng. He began writing poetry in the early seventies during the Cultural Revolution while posted to an agricultural brigade and took the penname Duo Duo—“too much, too much”—from the given name of his daughter who died in infancy.

In June 1989—the day after the Tiananmen Square massacre—Duo Duo left China for a reading tour of England and chose exile in the Netherlands. Returning to China in 2004, the literary community received Duo Duo with honor and praise.

For Mai Mang—“Duo Duo is a resolute seer of some of the most basic, universal human values that have often been shadowed in our troubled, modern time: creativity, nature, love, dreams, and wishful thinking.”

In 2010, Duo Duo became the first Chinese laureate of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, considered the American equivalent of the Nobel Prize.

His work includes: Looking Out from Death, Crossing the Sea, The Boy Who Catches Wasps, and Snow Plain.

Duo Duo currently resides on Hainan Island and teaches at Hainan University in China.