Lin Xue 林雪

After being chosen for Poetry Periodical’s 8th Youth Poetry Conference in 1988, Lin Xue went on to be recognised as one its ‘Top Ten Best Young Women Poets of the New Century’ in 2006, and won the 4th Lu Xun Prize for Literature for her poetry collection Sunflowers of the Earth the same year. She is also the author of the poetry collections Pale Blue Stars, Blue Swoon, On the Other Side of Poetry, and The Poetry of Lin Xue, as well as an essay collection, Flames Underwater, and a book of poetry criticism, I Still Prefer Love.

Reflecting on what poetry means to her, Lin Xue writes:

The poet’s calling is to name, to give form to things not yet seen, not yet illuminated. Like the Tang Dynasty poet Liu Yuxi transforming folk songs into poetry, like Yeats distilling a national narrative out of Irish mythology, like T. S. Eliot salvaging tradition from the fragments of civilization. To reconstruct, in modern language, the vitality, solemnity, and ritual quality of “song”; to capture the subtle tremors of contemporary life; to enact, whenever words and things call out to each other, a silent coronation.