Neustadt Prize 2010

"Duo Duo (Li Shizheng) was born in Beijing in 1951. As a boy during the Cultural Revolution, Duo Duo studied at a school in the Baiyangding countryside, where he began to write poetry. He and some of his childhood classmates are considered part of the Misty school of contemporary Chinese poetry. His collections include Looking Out from Death: From the Cultural Revolution to Tiananmen Square (trans.Gregory Lee with John Cayley, 1989) and  The Boy Who Catches Wasps (trans. Gregory Lee, 2002). Initially, Duo Duo’s poems were short and referenced many Western poets. In the 1980s his poems grew longer and more philosophical in nature. The morning after witnessing the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, Duo Duo flew to London, where he was scheduled to give a poetry reading at the British Museum. It was well over a decade before he returned to China, instead residing in the United Kingdom, Canada, and the Netherlands. His distance from China incited the second shift in his poetry: he began to write of exile and wandering. Upon his 2004 return to China, the literary community received him with honor. Presently, Duo Duo resides on Hainan Island and teaches at Hainan University."

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