Liao Yiwu

Liao Yiwu (; also known as Lao Wei ; born 16 June 1958) is a Chinese author, reporter, musician, and poet. He is a critic of China's Communist Party, for which he was imprisoned in 1990. His books, several of which are collections of interviews with ordinary people from the lower rungs of Chinese society, were published in Taiwan and Hong Kong but are banned in mainland China; some have been translated into Spanish, English, French, German, Polish and Czech. He has been living in Germany since April 2011.

Early life and education Liao Yiwu was born in 1958, the same year as The Great Leap Forward. During the famine of The Great Leap Forward, he suffered from edema and was close to dying. In 1966, his father was branded a counter-revolutionary during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Liao's parents filed for divorce to protect the children.

After high school, Liao traveled around the country. In his spare time he read banned Western poets such as John Keats and Charles Baudelaire. He started composing his own poems which were published in literary magazines. From 2003 to 2009, he lived in Lijiang, where he opened a music bar, and then Dali.

In 1998, he compiled The Fall of the Holy Temple, an anthology of underground poems from the 1970s, mainly from Chinese dissidents. One of China's vice premiers called it a "premeditated attempt to overthrow the government, and [claimed it was] supported by powerful anti-China groups." A French translation of some of these interviews appeared in 2003, an English translation was published under the name The Corpse Walker in 2008 and a German translation appeared in 2009.

In 2008 he signed the Charter 08 of his friend Liu Xiaobo, although he says of himself that he is not really interested in politics, just in his stories.

In May 2008, after the Sichuan earthquake, Liao went to the disaster region and interviewed survivors fighting corrupt officials. This material was published as Chronicles of the Big Earthquake in Hong Kong in 2009. Later that year he was allowed to leave the country for the first time. He visited Germany accepting invitations to literary festivals in Hamburg and Berlin as well as to an event in Cologne. He held numerous readings and gave interviews.

In June 2010, the Berlin International Literature Festival held a worldwide reading for Liao Yiwu in order to commemorate the massacre of Tiananmen Square, and to admonish China's human rights record. In March 2011, the Chinese police threatened him that if he were to publish any more he would be disappeared.

Prior to his departure from China, he lived under police surveillance with his wife in Chengdu, supporting himself with the royalties from his books published abroad.

Awards In 2003, he was awarded a Human Rights Watch Hellman-Hammett Grant. In 2007, he received a Freedom to Write Award from the Independent Chinese PEN Center. Authorities prevented him from attending the award ceremony in Beijing. In 2011 he was awarded the German Geschwister-Scholl-Preis. In 2012 he received the Ryszard Kapuściński Award In 2012 he received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. In his address at the prize ceremony in the Paulskirche, Liao Yiwu described China as "the source of global disasters" and an "ever-expanding garbage dump". He concluded his speech with the wish that "for the peaceful well-being of all humanity, this empire (China) must break apart".

List of works Books The Fall of the Holy Temple (1998) Report on China's Victims of Injustice Testimonials (證詞), German translation published by Fischer in June 2011 (by the title of Für ein Lied und hundert Lieder. Ein Zeugenbericht aus chinesischen Gefängnissen). It describes the horrific treatment of Liao Yiwu and other political prisoners in a Chongqing prison who were arrested after the June 4, 1989, crackdown. Interviews with the Lower Strata of Chinese Society 中國底層訪談錄 2 volumes, Changjiang Publishing House, China (banned by the Chinese Communist Party Propaganda Department and the PRC Government's Publications Office) Interviews with the Lower Strata of Chinese Society 中國底層訪談錄 3 volumes, Maitian Publishing House of Taiwan 台灣麥田出版社.(2001) L'Empire des bas-fonds French translation of some of these interviews, 2003 The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China from the Bottom Up, hardcover: Pantheon (April 15, 2008), 336 pages, ; trade paperback: Anchor; Reprint edition (May 5, 2009) 352 pages, English translation of 27 interviews. Fräulein Hallo und der Bauernkaiser, German translation, 2009 China's Unjust Court Cases 中國冤案錄 Volume 1, Laogai Foundation, 2003, Washington, D.C. (www.laogai.org) Black Literary Treasury, Edited by Liao Tianqi. China's Petitioner Villages 中國上访村 Mirror Publishing Co., 2005, US China's Unjust Court Cases 中國冤案錄 Volume 2, Laogai Foundation, Washington, 2005 D.C. Black Literary Treasury, Edited by Liao Tianqi. The Last of China's Landlords 最後的地主 (two volumes) printed in Hong Kong, published by The Laogai Research Foundation, Washington D.C. April 2008. Website www.laogai.org Earthquake Insane Asylum 地震瘋人院 in Taiwan 2009; Chronicles of the Big Earthquake in Hong Kong in 2009. French translation Quand la terre s’est ouverte au Sichuan : Journal d’une tragédie in 2010. Shepherds of the Far East 遠東牧羊 April 2011 in the U.S. and its English translation God is Red Chinese 地震瘋人院 in Taiwan 2009; French edition 2010, HarperCollins August 2011. collects accounts of the persecution of Christians in China since 1949 My Witness in German translation June 2011, which discusses the experiences of Liao Yiwu and other political prisoners in a Chongqing prison in the early 1990s. For a Song and a Hundred Songs: A Poet's Journey Through a Chinese Prison (2013) In English, 'Love Songs from the Gulag' (Barque Press, 2018) Bullets and Opium: Stories of China after the Great Massacre (Simon and Schuster: 2019) Wuhan in German translation 2022

Poems

"The Yellow City" (1989) "Idol" (1989) "Massacre" (1989)