Y ang Lian was born in Switzerland in 1955, and grew up in Beijing. He beganwriting when he was sent to the countryside in the 1970s. On his return to Beijing he became one of the founders of the ‘Misty’ school of contemporary Chinese poetry. Among other things, Yang Lian is known for his poem sequences and long poems which display a profound understanding of, and creative links with, Classical Chinese poetry.
His poems became well-known and influential inside and outside of China in the 1980s, especially when his sequence ‘Norilang’ was criticized by the Chinese government during the ‘Anti-Spiritual Pollution’ movement.
Yang Lian was invited to visit Australia and New Zealand in 1988 and became a poet in exile after the Tiananmen massacre. Since that time, he has continued to write and speak out as a highly individual voice in world literature, politics and culture.
Yang Lian has published eleven 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 Eastern European languages.
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 has been elected two times of a board member of PEN International in 2008 and 2011. He has been living in London since 1997.
January of 2012, Yang Lian has won Nonino International Literature Prize in Italy, the juries of the prize were presided by V S Naipaul.
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.
June of 2014, Yang Lian won the International Capri Prize 2014, a well-known international poetry prize.
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). Among his 12 books of poems in English translation, his most representative works include Where the Sea Stands Still, a collection of short poems and sequence, (Bloodaxe Books,UK, 1999); Yi, a book-length poem (Green Integer, USA, 2002); Concentric Circles, another book-length poem (Bloodaxe Books UK, 2005), and Riding Pisces: Poems From Five Collections (Shearsman Books, UK, 2008), his latest book in English translation is Lee Valley Poems – A project of poems and translation (Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2010).
Yang Lian and the Scottish poet W. N. Herbert together with Brian Holton 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, 2012. And Yang Lian and W. N. Herbert are co-editors of The Third Shore, the bilingual anthology of Chinese – English Poets in mutual translation, publish by Shearsman Books in UK and published by The Eastern Chinese Formal University Press in China, 2013.
Yang Lian has three volumes of collected works, Yang Lian’s works 1982-1997 (2 volumes) and Yang Lian’s new works 1998-2002, published in China between 1999 and 2003, and one selection of Essays, A Tower Built Downward, published in Beijing in 2009. He published four books of poems and prose in Taiwan between 1994 and 2009.
Yang Lian’s latest long poem was titled The Narrative Poem, a book-length autobiographical poem written 2006 – 2010. At 2011, its first edition of 3000 copies has been collected back and destroyed by Chinese Officials because of “Reality Elegy”, part of the long poem, was subjected on Tiananmen Massacre in Beijing, 1989, however, the book “marked the new altitude of Contemporary Chinese Poetry”, reviewed by Tang Xiaodu, one of the most important poetry-critics.
Yang Lian has been invited to be writer in residence by many international institutions, among others are Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, DAAD (Berlin programme), Yaddo Arts Colony, Amherst College, Bard College (USA), Cove Park (UK), MEET (France), University of Sydney (Australia), University of Auckland (New Zealand).
He was invited to be on the jury for the Lettre-Ulysess Award for the art of Reportage (Germany), International contest of Essays (Germany), and President of the Jury of “The Crystal Vilenica Award, 2008”, as well as having been invited to be an adviser of “Free The Word” (International Literature Festival of PEN), International Literature Festival of Berlin, Poetry International Taipei…etc.
Since 2005, he has been the artistic director of “Unique Mother Tongue”, a privately organized international seminar series based on London.
Since 2012, he became the artistic director of Artsbj.com, a privately owned website, and started “Arts.com International Chinese Poetry Prize”, an international poetry prize for the poems written in Chinese. It is based on a private website in China and partnered with British Centre for Literary Translation based in UK. The website been sit up for gathering the energy of “the poetical others” thus deepen the individual thinking with the challenges of Globalisation, more than 80000 poems been sent to the website worldwide within one year. In June 2013, Poetry International Rotterdam, the biggest poetry festival in the world, selected Contemporary Chinese Poetry as its theme, Yang Lian designed an online Synchronic International Poetry Festival between Rotterdam and China, and there were 6.7 million of clicks during three hours of the event, the number became 14 million next day, and finally reached 33 million and more. The prize given ceremony has been held in Beijing, Sep. 2013.
Yang Lian has been elected a board member of PEN International in 2007, and reelected in 2011, and he has been invited to be a guest-professor by Nanjing University of the Arts, one of the oldest and best known universities on Arts in China, and The Arts College of Hebei University 2013.
Yang Lian has been invited to become a member of The Norwegian Academy for Literature and Freedom of Expression in 2013.
Yang Lian lives in London and Berlin now, after his one year fellowship in Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin (2012 – 2013).