January-February 2025: Mu Cao 墓草

Mu Cao 墓草 (b.1974, Henan, China) is a contemporary Chinese poet and fiction writer of working-class background. As the first out gay poet from mainland China, his poetry explores queer desire and working-class life on the fringe of Chinese society. A self-taught poet, Mu Cao has published six poetry collections and four works of fiction in Chinese since 1998. Mu Cao was awarded China’s Jianghu 江湖 (Freebooters) magazine Underground Poetry Award in 2015 and, recently, the Prince Claus Impact Award (the Netherlands) in 2024. This made Mu Cao the only writer from around the world that year to receive the prestigious Prince Claus Impact Award for outstanding achievements in arts and culture.

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For our first Bookclub feature of 2025 we're delighted to be able to publish four poems by Mu Cao, translated by Hongwei Bao. You can read them here in both Chinese and in Hongwei's English translation.

Mu Cao is emerging as a key poetic voice in China, and now in English translation. The jury of the Prince Claus Impact Award stated that Mu Cao was honoured -

For his unique literary voice, characterised by its raw and fierce qualities, fearlessly delving into taboo subjects with rare expressiveness; For shedding light in unprecedented ways on the realities of marginalised communities in China; For his contribution to queer culture in China and asserting queerness beyond Western boundaries; For his commitment to fighting against social hierarchies, emphasising the importance of self-expression and agency.

- Crossing (Amsterdam: Prince Claus Fund, 2024)

Maghiel van Crevel, Professor of Chinese Language and Literature from Leiden University commends Mu Cao in his laudation for the award: 

Mu Cao is a poet and fiction writer whose life and work defy social convention in every respect. He is the author of a literary oeuvre that has emerged against the odds, carried by an inimitable voice that blends indignation and imagination to address a fiercely personal experience as well as overarching issues of social justice […] Mu Cao’s expression of his sexuality, his socioeconomic circumstances, and his subject matter intersect to put him in a category of his own vis-à-vis a literary scene to which he remains the ultimate outsider. His raw, down-to-earth language can be at once mischievous and deadly serious, provocative and introspective, proud and devastated, hilarious and heartbreaking.

In an official video interview made for the award, Mu Cao explains the importance of writing for himself: 

I used to be a farmer. I worked as a street vendor, cleaner, mover, warehouse worker, factory worker, hotel attendant, restaurant waiter, caregiver, web editor and more. I’m a wanderer in the city. I have been working for over thirty years, with no social security, no property. But I like writing. Writing is the belief that keeps me alive.

Mu Cao’s novel Qi’er 弃儿 (In the Face of Death We Are Equal), translated into English by Scott Meyers, was published by Seagull Press in 2019. Hongwei Bao reviews the book for Words Without Borders: 

A story about rural and working-class gay men’s lives at the margins of Chinese society, Mu Cao’s novel reveals a hidden corner of Chinese society and Chinese gay life. Constantly shifting narrative perspectives and intertwining elements of magical realism and the grotesque, the novel does not make for an easy read. It refuses narrative closure and challenges liberal, middle-class gay sentimentality. It can only be fully appreciated when readers are willing to break the China/West dichotomy and step out of the comfort zone of gay liberalism.

Since his first poetry collection, Mu Cao de shi 墓草的诗 (Mu Cao’s Poems), published in 1998, most of Mu Cao’s books in Chinese have been self-published, due to the explicit depictions of sexuality in his work. In 2023, Taipei’s Showwe Press published two survey collections for Mu Cao: a short story collection Gudu de bianyuan 孤独的边缘 (The Lonely Fringe) and a poetry collection Zai diceng 在底层 (On the Underside). 

Modern Chinese Literature and Culture hosts an archive of Mu Cao’s works in translation and scholarship on Mu Cao. Leiden University Library’s Unofficial Poetry from China digital collection holds five books of his poetry and two multiple-author anthologies produced under his editorship, all open access. 

Many thanks to Hongwei for contributing this feature! As well as being a translator, Hongwei is a poet in his own right, and we featured him and his collection The Passion of the Rabbit God in the Bookclub in September 2024.