The Prince Claus Fund web page on Mu Cao includes a beautiful short video on Mu Cao, made by the Fund in September 2024 and first shown during the award ceremony for this year’s Prince Claus Impact Awards: https://edu.nl/wj6y4. (The video is right below the photo at the top; the play button is not clearly visible, but it sits in the middle of the burgundy rectangle.) In the video, Mu Cao explains what writing means to him. Below the video, there’s a brief profile of the poet in English.
Crossing, a book produced by the Prince Claus Fund on the occasion of the 2024 Impact Awards, includes laudations for each of the six laureates. After Mu Cao was nominated (in 2023), the Fund approached me for information on his life and work, to support the jury as it made its way from close to two hundred nominees to six awardees. In this capacity I had the privilege of writing the laudation for Mu Cao, for which I drew on an essay I co-authored with Hongwei Bao that is forthcoming in 2025. The text of the laudation is below.
Maghiel van Crevel
MU CAO: AN INIMITABLE VOICE
In Crossing (Amsterdam: Prince Claus Fund, 2024): 96-98.
Mu Cao is a poet and fiction writer whose life and work defy social convention in every respect. He is the author of a literary oeuvre that has emerged against the odds, carried by an inimitable voice that blends indignation and imagination to address a fiercely personal experience as well as overarching issues of social justice.
Born and raised in a village in rural China, Mu Cao was expelled from school at age fifteen and has since sustained himself with precarious labor, mostly in Zhengzhou and Beijing. One of three hundred million labor migrants who have flocked from the Chinese countryside to the cities since the 1980s, he has held dozens of jobs, from assembly line worker to web salesperson and from noodle-maker to barbershop attendant. Living on a shoestring, he works in order to save money so he can quit and write. When the money runs out, he looks for work again.
Mu Cao is known as China’s first openly gay poet and pulls no punches in his depiction of “deviant” gender and sexuality, in poetry and fiction alike. Similarly, he writes with uncompromising candour on life on the underside in postsocialist China, where inequality is extreme: exploitation, discrimination, hopelessness. Both topics count as politically sensitive and are subject to censorship, so he can only publish through unofficial channels—a thriving subculture in China, which are also fragile and vulnerable.
Up to the early 2010s, the internet offered refuge. Mu Cao had a rich online presence on his personal website and an online forum called Comrade Poetry Web, where “comrade” really means queer. But from the mid-2010s, with state surveillance on the rise and reduced tolerance of LGBTQ+ content, much of his writing has been erased from the web—although this erasure is never complete or definitive, and many texts remain available on Chinese and foreign websites. He has many print collections of poetry and fiction to his name, published unofficially in China over the years and circulated through subcultural networks. A two-volume survey anthology of his poetry and short fiction came out in Taiwan in 2023, outside the censor’s reach.
Mu Cao’s expression of his sexuality, his socioeconomic circumstances, and his subject matter intersect to put him in a category of his own vis-à-vis a literary scene to which he remains the ultimate outsider. His raw, down-to-earth language can be at once mischievous and deadly serious, provocative and introspective, proud and devastated, hilarious and heartbreaking. Translations into English, French, Slovenian, Dutch, Japanese, and Italian signal growing international recognition of his work.
Mu Cao’s writing is marked by a forcefulness that can sow the seeds of emancipation and social change. At the same time, it reminds us that great art cannot be reduced to its social or historical context. His oeuvre is a testament to extraordinary talent, courage, and independence of mind.