Case History
Dao’s books of poetry include The Rose of Time: New and Selected Poems (New Directions, 2010); Unlock (2000); At the Sky’s Edge: Poems 1991–1996 (1996), for which David Hinton won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets; Landscape Over Zero (1995); Forms of Distance (1994); Old Snow (1991); and The August Sleepwalker (1990). His work has been translated into over 30 languages. His poem “The Answer” has become the anthem of resistance of China’s democracy movement, from the first demonstrations in Beijing in 1976 to commemorations of Wuhan physician and whistleblower Li Wenliang in January 2021.
He is also the author of short stories and essays. In 1978, he and colleague Mang Ke founded the underground literary magazine Jin Tian (Today), which ceased publication under police order. Dao was a recipient of the PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award in 1990, and he used the award to revive Today, this incarnation disseminated among the Chinese intellectual community outside China. Dao is only the second Chinese, after Hubei native Lu Yuan in 1998, to receive the Golden Wreath Award of the Struga International Poetry Festival in 2015. Dao is the 50th winner of the prestigious prize.