Considered the central literary figure of the post- Misty poetry movement of the 1980s, Bai Hua was born in Chongqing in 1956. After graduating from the Guangzhou Foreign Languages Institute, he taught at various universities before starting work as an independent writer. His first book, Expression (1988), received immediate critical acclaim. A highly demanding writer, Bai Hua has composed only about ninety poems over the past thirty years, and from the late 1990s until 2007, he wrote no poetry at all. However, during this more than a decade of silence, he remained a prolific writer of prose and hybrid texts. Bai Hua has received the Rougang Poetry Award and the Anne Kao Poetry Prize.