Yang Lian

“Each time you admit defeat—you go down another flight of stairs.”

Poet and literary critic Yang Lian was born in 1955 in Bern, Switzerland, where his parents worked as Chinese diplomats. He spent his childhood in Beijing—in the midst of the Cultural Revolution—and began writing when he was sent to the countryside to dig graves—as a form of re-education.

“The poet can only move from one word to another—one mask to another—like an invisible person who lives in eternal wandering.”

Returning to Beijing—Yang Lian became one of the first group of young, underground poets who published the literary magazine Jintian (Today)—an offshoot of the big character posters on Democracy Wall. Their nakedness of spirit was criticized by the authorities as obscure—misty—culminating with an arrest warrant issued for Yang Lian.

“Hanging upside down in the sky”—Yang Liang found himself in New Zealand—blacklisted and stripped of his Chinese citizenship after the 1989 events in Tiananmen Square.

Yang Lian now lives in London and is married to the novelist Liu Yo Yo.

His poetry collections include: Non-Person Singular, Masks and Crocodile, Notes of a Blissful Ghost, Concentric Circles, Dark Blue Poems, and Riding Pisces.