Chinese poet and fiction writer Mu Cao 墓草 (1974) has received one of the 2024 Prince Claus Impact Awards, as one of six biennial laureates in art and cultural practice worldwide (https://edu.nl/x8bjf). The Prince Claus Fund is an independent foundation dedicated to culture and development. The Impact Awards honor groundbreaking artists and cultural practitioners whose work inspires positive social change. The 2024 laureates received their awards on 3 December in the Royal Palace in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Mu Cao is known as China’s first openly gay poet. He is also one of China’s earliest migrant worker poets (aka battler poets 打工诗人) and writes with uncompromising candor on life on the underside, in his poetry and his fiction alike. Both queerness and socioeconomic inequality count as sensitive topics in China and Mu Cao has only published through unofficial channels there. An official, two-volume survey anthology of his poetry and short fiction came out in Taiwan in 2023 (https://edu.nl/fdg79). Five books of his poetry and two multiple-author anthologies produced under his editorship can be freely accessed at the Leiden University Library digital collection of unofficial poetry from China (https://edu.nl/k4d4d).
For scholarship, media, and translations on/of Mu Cao’s work, see the MCLC Resource Center bibliographies on literary studies: Author studies > M (https://u.osu.edu/mclc/h-q/#M) and Translations (author) > M (https://edu.nl/q6qc6).
Posted by: Maghiel van Crevel