Yu Jian

Yu Jian (b. 1954), a poet, author and award-winning documentary filmmaker, was born in the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan. With the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, his schooling was interrupted, his parents were sent away for “re-education,” and he became an apprentice in a factory. At the age of twenty, Yu Jian began writing his first poems in free verse. In 1980, when university education once again became a possibility for young Chinese people, Yu Jian passed the entrance examinations for Yunnan University, becoming a student in the department of Chinese Language and Literature. He became known as a student poet and an energetic literary activist, helping to establish several literary clubs as well as edit various publications. He published the controversial long poem File Zero in 1994, then turned to prose and short poems, publishing a collection of travel sketches and impressions of daily life in 1999 under the title Notes from the Human World. He began his long poem Flight in 1996 and finally published it in 2000. His work has been translated into a dozen languages.