Fiction. East Asia Studies. Translated from the Chinese by John A. Crespi, with contributions from Harriet Evans, Jiang Hong, Gregory B. Lee, Larry McCaffery, and Danny Wang. Duo Duo was recently named the 2010 laureate of the $50,000 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the only international literary prize from the United States for which poets, playwrights, and novelists are given equal consideration. The Neustadt is widely considered to be the most prestigious international prize after the Nobel Prize for Literature and is often referred to as the "American Nobel" because of its record of twenty-seven laureates, candidates, or jurors who in the past thirty-nine years have been awarded Nobels following their involvement with the Neustadt. Duo Duo is the twenty-first Neustadt laureate and the first Chinese author to win the prize.

Author City: Hainan Island CHI

Duo Duo (Li Shizheng) was born in Beijing in 1951. As a boy during the Cultural Revolution, Duo Duo studied at a school in the Baiyangding countryside, where he began to write poetry. He and some of his childhood classmates are considered part of the "Misty" school of contemporary Chinese poetry. His primary collection in English translation is THE BOY WHO CATCHES WASPS translated by Gregory Lee (Zephyr Press, 2002). Initially, Duo Duo's poems were short and referenced many Western poets. In the 1980s his poems grew longer and more philosophical in nature. The morning after witnessing the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, Duo Duo flew to London, where he was scheduled to give a poetry reading at the British Museum. It was well over a decade before he returned to China, instead residing in the United Kingdom, Canada, and the Netherlands. His distance from China incited the second shift in his poetry: he began to write of exile and wandering. Upon his 2004 return to China, the literary community received him with honor. At present, Duo Duo resides on Hainan Island and teaches at Hainan University. In the fall of 2009 an international jury representing nine countries selected the critically acclaimed Chinese poet Duo Duo as The 2010 laureate of the $50,000 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, sponsored by The University of Oklahoma and its international magazine, World Literature Today. In 2010, Zephyr Press published his story collection, SNOW PLAIN, translated by John A. Crespi.