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Chinese poet wins Neustadt Prize
SHIZHENG
By JAMES D. WATTS JR., World Scene Writer
Published: 11/1/2009 2:28 AM
Last Modified: 11/1/2009 7:04 AM
Chinese poet Li Shizheng, who writes under the name Duo Duo, is the winner of the 2010 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, presented by the University of Oklahoma.
The Neustadt Prize is one of the richest literary awards in the world and the only international literary award in the United States for which novelists, poets and playwrights are equally eligible.
It also been called the "American Nobel," since in the course of its 39-year history 27 Neustadt recipients, nominees and jurors have gone to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Duo Duo is the first Chinese author to win the $50,000 prize, which is awarded every two years.
Chinese poet Mai Mang (Yibing Huang), who currently teaches Chinese literature at Connecticut College, served on the Neustadt Prize jury and nominated Duo Duo for the award.
"Duo Duo is a great lone traveler crossing borders of nation, language and history," Mang said, "as well as a resolute seer of some of the most basic, universal human values that have often been shadowed in our troubled modern time: creativity, nature, love, dreams and wishful thinking."
Duo Duo was born in Beijing in 1951 and began writing poetry in the early 1970s as a youth. Many of his early poems critiqued the Cultural Revolution from an insider's point of view in a highly sophisticated, original style.
After witnessing the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, Duo Duo left China and did not return for more than a decade. Upon his return to China in 2004, the
literary community received him with honor and praise.
Duo Duo will visit OU in fall 2010 to accept the award.
To read one of Duo Duo's poems, go to tulsaworld.com/inengland.
By JAMES D. WATTS JR., World Scene Writer
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