Lu Ye 路也

Lu Ye did her B.A. and M.A. in Chinese Language and Literature at Shandong University and is now the professor at the University of Jinan in Shandong Province. Her awards include the Chinese National Award for Young Poets from Poetry Periodical (2005), the People’s Literature Award (2011 and 2021), the Ding Ling Literature Prize (2022), and the 8th Lu Xun Prize for Literature (2022). In 2006 Poetry Periodical named her one of the ‘Top Ten Best Young Women Poets of the New Century’. Her poetry collections to date include My Nowhere, My Nothingville (2006), Earth’s Sweetest Heart (2012), Letters From Mountains (2015), From Now On (2016), Under the Sky (2021), and Snowed In (2021); a volume of her selected poems in English translation, I Live Alone, has been published in Australia.

On her practice of writing poetry, Lu Ye writes:

When I was young my poetry was all about placing the female experience against a backdrop of nature, making modern meaning out of classical Chinese tropes and evoking a bright, exuberant tone that matches my own temperament. Now I’ve undergone a bit of a midlife shift. My aim, while still maintaining my own distinctive voice, is to take inner conflict, the heaviness of fate, even the entire predicament of human existence, and hand it over to nature – to the ‘wild’ – putting them in opposition and ultimately reconciling them. Though I don’t try to be ‘unfeminine’, I want to transcend gender. Though poetry may be rooted in the human world it ought to express a yearning for transcendence, for something of the divine. In terms of style, I have always tried to write in a way that is both elegant and colloquial. And I believe that if your life is vast, your poetry will be too.