Yang Lian

You can tell Yang Lian does not work in an office. It is his wild hair, the undone fly he notices only when it comes to posing for a photograph, and the splint wrapped around the index finger of his right hand - the result of a sprain sustained from lifting a table.

'I decided to join the yakuza,' Yang quips in a booming baritone that must make him a great reader of his strange, elusive work which is framed by equally left-field titles.

His latest collected volume, Notes Of A Blissful Ghost (Renditions), features poems called Perpendicular To The Paper, Them (Feminine Plural) and 12 Storkwinkel, Berlin. The last contains this characteristic couplet: 'whoever hides in the sound of the wind never fall again into black oysters of feet'. Philip Larkin he ain't.

All the same, the Anglo-Chinese book that Yang most admires, Waiting, by the United States-based dissident Ha Jin, is by no means experimental. Set in 1960s China, the award-winning 1999 novel describes a soldier's 18-year fight to escape an arranged marriage and wed the nurse he loves in a society determined to control his every move.

Yang acknowledges that, on the surface, the novel seems quite straightforward and realistic. But it scrutinises reality so closely that it exposes what he sees as its underlying strangeness.

All the thwarted lovers can do is wait for the soldier's wife to grant him a divorce. 'And they are waiting years and years until the love actually becomes so bitter and so sour,' Yang says, his expression shifting from grimace to grin.