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. he was among the “Misty” school of Poets. His poems became well-known and influential inside and outside of China in the 1980s, especially when his sequence ‘Norilang’ was published in 1983.

Yang Lian was invited to visit Australia and New Zealand in 1988 and next year, he became a poet in exile and started his journey through out the global since then. All these years, his literary writing, as well as his out spoken voice, has been called as a highly individual voice in world literature, politics and culture.

Yang Lian has published fourteen collections of poems, two collections of prose and one selection of essays in Chinese. His work has also been translated into more than twenty languages, including English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese and many Eastern European languages. Among 14 books of poems in English translation, his most representative works including the sequences and long poems such as Yi, Where the Sea Stands Still, Concentric Circles, Narrative Poem and Anniversary Snow, they display a profound understanding of, and creative links with, Classical Chinese poetry. His work has been reviewed as "like MacDiarmid meets Rilke with Samurai sword drawn!", "one of the most representative voices of Chinese literature" and "one of the great world poets of our era". Yang Lian and the Scottish poet W. N. Herbert together with Brian Holton and Qin Xiaoyu are the co-editors of Jade Ladder, a brand new Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Poetry (1978 -- 2008) in English, and published by Bloodaxe Books in Apr, 2011.

2019, Yang Lian won “Premio Sulmona” prize in Italy; and the Beijing Literature Magazine Prize for Poetry in China. 2018, Yang Lian won the first prize for Poetry of “He Ze Du Lin Cup”, Shanghai, China ; 2018 Premio International NordSud (2018 NordSud International Prize) for Literature, Italy. 2018 Janus Pannonius International Poetry Grand Prize in Hungary; and the 2018 L'Aquila International Literature Prize, Italy. His long poem “Concentric Circles” in Swedish translation (“Koncentriska Cirklar”) been selected into the “Litteraturtoppen” and the Daily News's 5 best poetry books of the year. 2017, Narrative Poem, Yang Lian’s autographical book-length poem selected as a recommended translation by Poetry book Society in UK, as well as won the English PEN Award. Yang Lian won also the Shanghai Literature Magazine Prize for Poetry. 2016, Yang Lian was awarded The 2016 Pacific International Poetry Prize in Taiwan. 2015, Yang Lian has won The Li Bai Nomination Poetry Prize; Zuo Pin (Works) Magazine’s Prize for Sequence; The First Long Poem Prize (Fo Shan City, China); Great Kunlun Cultural Prize․Prize for Outstanding Contribution to Poetry. 2014, Yang Lian won the International Capri Prize 2014, a well-known international poetry prize. December of 2013, Yang Lian’s “Concentric Circles Trilogy” (YI, Concentric Circles and The Narrative Poem) won the first issue of Tianduo Award for Long Poems in China. January of 2012, Yang Lian has won Nonino International Literature Prize in Italy, the juries of the prize were presided by V S Naipaul. Yang Lian was also awarded the Flaiano International Poetry Prize (Italy, 1999) and his Where the Sea Stands Still: New Poems was Poetry Books Society Recommended Translation (UK, 1999).

Yang Lian has been elected a board member of PEN International in 2007, and reelected in 2011.

Yang Lian has been invited to become a member of The Norwegian Academy for Literature and Freedom of Expression in 2013, and a distinguished professor by Shantou University, Guangdong Province, China.

Yang Lian is one of two chief-editors of Survivors Poetry Magazine, a poetry magazine found in China in 1988 and been banned after Tiananmen Massacre in Beijing 1989, it is online only today: www.survivorspoetry.net

Yang Lian lives in London and Berlin.

Yang Lian’s website: www.yanglian.net

SELECTED REVIEWS ABOUT YANG LIAN

With a western and modernist sensibility, with an extraordinary imaginative and metaphorical language, he (Yang Lian) reinterprets the themes of the ancient Chinese civilization, almost shamanic, opening them to the existential problems and tensions of the modern world. His poetry of universal value thus becomes the best possible bridge between Chinese tradition and Western culture.

- 46° Premio Sulmona 2019 - Premio Nazionale per la Cultura "Antonio Pelino"

 

'The poetic works of Yang Lian, International Nonino Prize 2012, is one of heights of Contemporary Chinese thought. Grounded to the millenary root of his culture, he reinterprets it reinventing and opening it to the tensions of Contemporaneity, touching in his lines all the great questions of our existence and reminding us that “poetry is our only mother tongue”. He lives and writes as an exile not only from his land, pushing his view to the extreme limit. An absolute exile and distant profound poet far beyond our space-time. '

- The Motivation of Nonino International Literature Prize 2012, the jury of the prize, presided by V. S. Naipaul (Nobel Laureate for Literature 2001)

 

'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

 

'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 …… the most important voice of Modern Chinese lyrics.’

- Irmy Schweiger: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zietung.

 

Those lonely Tang dynasty poets may be Yang’s original blues brother, but he’s much a modernist and symbolist in the vein of Mallarme or Rimbaud, whose famous “The Drunken Boat” is recalled in one poem…… Yang Lian’s work is rooted not in geography but his own imagination……to exist in Yang’s lines can be a gorgeous but frustrating adventure.

- Tim Kindseth: Time Magazine.

 

This hauntingly beautiful collection, with its Chinese classical sensibility wedded to modernist methods, is a remarkable addition to London's literature of exile.

- Boyd Tonkin: The Independent.

 

The poem’s timelessness, which equally can be conceived as a receptivity to all times…… it is not some withheld knowledge but a lure toward the unpredictable: “Forever excavating the darkness behind the eyes” (“Thunder 7”, YI)…… Yang Lian points out that exile and dissent are simply the condition of Poetry.

- Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas: Chicago Review.

 

It is Fascinating how Yang Lian’s poems uncover memory, explore archaic depth and create a timeless space related to Taoist “emptiness”.

- Ilma Rakusa: Neue Zürcher Zeitung

 

（Narrative Poem）.....the poems in this dual-text collection are lush with distinct, shaped images that sit like leaves on a tree, gathering and expressing the energy of a single, connected vitality.

- US's World Literature Today (Jan 2018)

 

（Narrative Poem）.....the poems in this dual-text collection are lush with distinct, shaped images that sit like leaves on a tree, gathering and expressing the energy of a single, connected vitality.

– US's World Literature Today (Jan 2018)

 

（Narrative Poem） this final elegy drews together the threads of the elegies so far.

– Lucas Klein: Translation and Literature 27, (No2, 2018)

 

In Narrative poem, Yang Lian turns his first-hand experiences of these man-made catastrophes......into a radically strange montage. Narrative Poem would read as elegiac except that we are repeatedly made to regard that mode as premature......This is what Yang Lian calls a “poem’s affront”. Harm does its thing — and if it then doubles back to do it again, so too must poetry. Both will get there at the same time.

– NAN Z DA: TLS (Aug, 2018)