Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Thursday 24 November
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
In May 2011, poet and novelist Liao Yiwu was prevented from visiting the Sydney Writers’ Festival after Chinese authorities refused to grant him an exit permit. It was the sixteenth time he’d been prevented from leaving the country.
Now living in exile in Germany, one of the world’s most compelling voices will visit Australia for the first time, free to speak his mind about contemporary Chinese society. Liao Yiwu is the author of the celebrated collection The Corpse Walker and Other True Stories of Life in China. His writing bears witness to a hidden China and connects readers to a people living on society’s bottom rung.
Featuring
Liao Yiwu
Liao Yiwu is a Chinese poet, novelist and screenwriter currently living in exile in Germany because of government suppression of his work in China.
He is the author of the epic poem ‘Massacre’, the publication of which led to his four-year imprisonment. His non-fiction works include The Corpse Walker and Other True Stories of Life in China (Text Publishing, 2011). In 2003 he received a Human Rights Watch Hellman-Hammett Grant and in 2007 he received a Freedom to Write Award from the Independent Chinese PEN Centre.