Liao Yiwu (China)

The hitherto apolitical hippie-poet Liao Yiwu paid for his poem »Massacre, which was dedicated to the victims of June 4th 1989 in Tienanmen Square, with four years’ imprisonment and two suicide attempts. His experiences of this time were described in the text »For one song and a hundred songs«, which the author of »Interviews With the Lower Strata of Chinese Society« had to rewrite three times, as the manuscript was repeatedly confiscated by the authorities. He describes with literate intensity the brutal reality of the Chinese prison system, the harassment by prison guards and other prisoners, the torture, human closeness and the boredom of daily life in prison. The report is unsparing when it comes to himself as well. The imprisonment made Liao politically aware, and literature and music (a fellow prisoner taught him how to play the flute) helped to keep him sane. He learned to maintain his inner independence, despite the horror surrounding him. In this book, as in »Interviews With the Lower Strata of Chinese Society«, Liao Yiwu shows himself to be one of the great contemporary Chinese writers. And he reveals himself in the poem cycle »Love Songs from the Gulag« (to be printed here in full for the first time) to be a significant and powerful poet.