Search results for ""Author Duo Duo""

Duo Duo was recently named the 2010 laureate of the $50,000 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the only international literary prize from the United States for which poets, playwrights, and novelists are given equal consideration. The Neustadt is widely considered to be the most prestigious international prize after the Nobel Prize for Literature and is often referred to as the "American Nobel" because of its record of twenty-seven laureates, candidates, or jurors who in the past thirty-nine years have been awarded Nobels following their involvement with the Neustadt. Duo Duo is the twenty-first Neustadt laureate and the first Chinese author to win the prize. Chinese poet Mai Mang, who currently teaches Chinese literature at Connecticut College, served on the Neustadt Prize jury and nominated Duo Duo for the award. He notes that "Duo Duo is a great lone traveler crossing borders of nation, language, and history, as well as a resolute seer of some of the most basic, universal human values that have often been shadowed in our troubled modern time: creativity, nature, love, dreams, and wishful thinking." Robert Con Davis-Undiano, WLT's executive director, adds that "Duo Duo is foremost among a group of first-rate Chinese poets who deserve serious attention and recognition in the West." Duo Duo (Li Shizheng) was born in Beijing in 1951. He started writing poetry in the early 1970s as a youth during the isolated midnight hours of the Cultural Revolution, and much of his early writing critiqued the Cultural Revolution from an insider's point of view in a highly sophisticated, original style.

Read more less

Longlisted for the 2022 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, this authoritative new collection by one of China’s most lauded poets is “a thrill to read” (Drew Calvert, Asymptote) “Words as Grain offers Zen koan-like poems that call for rereading and contemplation. As the poet himself says in ‘Reading Great Poems,’ ‘let the dialogue between thought and silence continue.’ We are fortunate to be a party to this sustained and intense dialogue.”—John Bradley, Rain Taxi While keeping a cautious distance from literary trends and labeling, Duo Duo has emerged as one of the world’s preeminent poets. His poems respond to the Chinese political landscape from the Cultural Revolution to the Tiananmen Square tragedy and beyond. Some are written from the vantage point of exile abroad, others in his homeland, but all inscribe an ache for original expression, a sense of place, and the essence of language. In exacting renderings by award-winning translator Lucas Klein, this career-spanning anthology features Duo Duo’s entire oeuvre since his return to China in 2004, as well as a representative selection of his earlier poems, presenting nearly five decades of work. This collection traces the evolution, in a particular historical context and cultural tradition, of one of the most vibrant poets at work in the world today.

Read more less

Duo Duo is the same generation as Bei Dao, and was likewise heavily involved in restarting the anthology of Chinese literature, “Today.” Duo Duo is the proverbial “poets’ poet,” and a major collection of his work has not previously appeared due to the complexity of his verse. This book was originally accepted by the University of California Press, but the editor who accepted the MS departed, and Eliot Weinberger helped me to extricate it from their vaults. ND had originally hoped to do a book of Duo Duo’s, but after Laughlin’s death, less enthusiasm existed for new Chinese literature in the ND line.

Read more less

With his smooth, warm, ruddy face which radiated light in all directions, Chairman Mao Zedong was a fixture in Chinese propaganda posters produced between the birth of the People’s Republic in 1949 and the early 1980s. Chairman Mao, portrayed as a stoic superhero (aka the Great Teacher, the Great Leader, the Great Helmsman, the Supreme Commander), appeared in all kinds of situations (inspecting factories, smoking a cigarette with peasant workers, standing by the Yangzi River in a bathrobe, presiding over the bow of a ship, or floating over a sea of red flags), flanked by strong, healthy, ageless men and “masculinized” women and children wearing baggy, sexless, drab clothing. The goal of each poster was to show the Chinese people what sort of behavior was considered morally correct and how great the future of Communist China would be if everyone followed the same path toward utopia by uniting together. This book brings together a selection of colorful propaganda artworks and cultural artifacts from Max Gottschalk’s vast collection of Chinese propaganda posters, many of which are now extremely rare.

Read more less