City Gate, Open Up - Softcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Bei Dao, (the pen name of Zhao Zhenkai) was born in Beijing in 1949. During the Cultural Revolution, he worked as a concrete mixer and blacksmith for eleven years. Forced into exile after the Tiananmen Massacre, he lived in Europe and the US until 2007, then settling in Hong Kong until, only recently, moving back to Beijing. He has been hailed as "the soul of post-Mao poetry" (Yunte Huang) and praised for his "intense lyricism" (Pankaj Mishra). Bei Dao has received numerous awards for his poetry all over the world, and founded the International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong. His photography and paintings have been exhibited in China, Hong Kong, and Japan. New Directions publishes ten of his books.

Jeffrey Yang is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Line and Light. His translations include Ahmatjan Osman's Uyghurland, The Farthest Exile and Bei Dao's autobiography City Gate, Open Up: "crafted with poetic precision and enriched by Yang's assiduous translation" (The Wall Street Journal).