Hong Kong-based poet Bei Dao wins prestigious poetry prize
Beijing-born Bei Dao may yet get Nobel literature award after losing out last year
A top mainland Chinese poet based in Hong Kong has been awarded a prestigious international award for poetry, putting him on track for a future Nobel Prize for literature.
Beijing-born Bei Dao, a Chinese University professor since 2007, is only the second Chinese, after Hubei native Lu Yuan in 1998, to receive the Golden Wreath Award of the Struga International Poetry Festival.
It was a unanimous decision by an international jury to name 65-year-old Bei Dao, whose real name is Zhao Zhenkai, the 50th winner since the annual award began in Macedonia in 1966, the organisers said last Friday.
"Bei Dao has been living in Hong Kong for many years now, so this award also brings honour to the city he calls home," Ngan Shun-kau, former chief editor and now senior adviser to Cosmos Books, said.
Some see the Macedonian prize as a step towards the Nobel; with previous winners, including Joseph Brodsky and Eugenio Montale, having been feted as Nobel laureates before.
Bei Dao was a nominee for last year's Nobel Prize, which eventually went to French novelist Patrick Modiano.
A leading Chinese poet, he speaks of abuses of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and '70s through his works.
In 1978, he co-founded Jin Tian, or Today, magazine in Beijing but it was banned two years later. Following the 1989 pro-democracy push at Tiananmen Square that ended in a crackdown, the poet went into exile for 18 years - during which he wrote some of his best poems, such as Old Snow (1991), Forms of Distance (1994), and Unlock (2000).
"Bei Dao has been free to travel to China since 2006," Ngan said in response to the organisers' remarks that "the festival often awards foreign poets who are considered dissidents in their countries".
"The award has important symbolic significance for modern poetry in China and is a huge encouragement for the genre, which has a small market compared to, say, novels."
The veteran publisher believed the true value of great works came not from their political content but from their literary worth, and that, he said, was Bei Dao's winning ticket.
Bei Dao has described his latest opus, Poetry for Children, as "good for steering the intuition and sensitivity a child is born with".