Yang Lian
was born in Bern in 1955 and grew up in Beijing. He was sent to the countryside in 1974, at the time of the Cultural Revolution, for re-education through labor, where he began to write, and returned to Beijing after the death of Mao Zedong in 1977.
He co-founded the poetry group Obscure Poetry - Contemporary Chinese Poetry.
His long sequences of poems were widely read inside and outside China in the 1980s. In 1988, he was invited to Australia and New Zealand. After his protest over the Tian'anmen massacre, he has become a poet in exile.
His poems and writings have been translated into more than 30 languages. Yang Lian has published 10 books in German translation.
Yang Lian has won many international prizes, including the International Nonino Prize (2012), the Capri International Prize (2014), the Pacific International Poetry Prize (Taiwan, 2016), the Janus Pannonius International Poetry Award (2018), the first Sarah McGuire Prize for Poetry in Translation (2021). He has twice been elected to the PEN International Board. He was a fellow of the DAAD program (1991), Schloss Solitude (1994-1995), and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2012-13).
Yang Lian lives both in Berlin and London.
