Unreal City: A Chinese Poet in Auckland

London based Yang Lian is a celebrated Chinese poet and essayist, widely known both inside and outside China. He was invited to visit New Zealand in 1988, and arrived in Auckland in 1989, where he was at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre. His subsequent four traumatic years in New Zealand were extremely productive artistically and made his name internationally.
Unreal City
presents, in an English translation, a selection of poems from this period, as well as a number of his essays, appearing in English for the first time, which meditate upon the experience of living in an Antipodean city from a startling, fresh perspective. These fascinating and moving texts are accompanied by notes and an introduction, which sets Yang’s work in the context of Chinese, New Zealand and world literature.