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Contributor

Qiu Miaojin

Contributor

Qiu Miaojin

Qiu Miaojin (1969–95)—one of Taiwan’s most innovative literary modernists, and the country’s most renowned lesbian writer—was born in Chuanghua County in western Taiwan. She graduated with a degree in psychology from National Taiwan University and pursued graduate studies in clinical psychology at the University of Paris VIII . Her first published story, “Prisoner,” received the Central Daily News Short Story Prize, and her novella Lonely Crowds won the United Literature Association Award. While in Paris, she directed a thirty-minute film called Ghost Carnival, and not long after this, at the age of twenty-six, she committed suicide. The posthumous publications of her novels Last Words from Montmartre and Notes of a Crocodile (forthcoming from NYRB Classics) made her into one of the most revered countercultural icons in Chinese letters. After her death in 1995, she was given the China Times Honorary Prize for Literature. In 2007, a two-volume edition of her Diaries was published.

Articles by Qiu Miaojin

From “Notes of a Crocodile”
By Qiu Miaojin
“What if we ran out of things to talk about?”
Translated from Chinese by Bonnie Huie
from “Last Words from Montmartre”
By Qiu Miaojin
Dusk in the Latin Quarter was like a fairy tale or a love poem, like a Klimt mosaic, like glowing, rose-colored clouds reaching toward the heavens.
Translated from Chinese by Ari Larissa Heinrich