Yu Jian


Yu Jian, born 1954, is a Chinese poet, writer and documentary film director. He is a major figure among ‘The Third Generation Poets’ that came after the Misty Poetry movement of the early 1980s. His work has been translated into English, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Swedish, Danish, and Japanese.

Biography

Born in Kunming, China, on August 8, 1954, Yu Jian's schooling was interrupted in 1966 by the Cultural Revolution. He became a factory worker in 1969, where frequent power failures enabled him to read voraciously. He started writing poetry at the age of twenty. He studied in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, at Yunnan University, and was a literary activist, organising events and editing publications. His career as a published poet took off when his poem "6 Shangyi Street" was published in China's leading poetry journal Shikan in 1986. He published a controversial long poem File Zero in 1994, then a collection of travel sketches and impressions of daily life Notes from the Human World in 1999, and another long poem Flight in 2000.

Honours and awards