Duo Duo was recently named the 2010 laureate of the $50,000 Neustadt
International Prize for Literature, the only international literary
prize from the United States for which poets, playwrights, and novelists
are given equal consideration. The Neustadt is widely considered to be
the most prestigious international prize after the Nobel Prize for
Literature and is often referred to as the American Nobel because of its
record of twenty-seven laureates, candidates, or jurors who in the past
thirty-nine years have been awarded Nobels following their involvement
with the Neustadt. Duo Duo is the twenty-first Neustadt laureate and the
first Chinese author to win the prize.
Chinese poet Mai Mang, who currently teaches Chinese literature at
Connecticut College, served on the Neustadt Prize jury and nominated Duo
Duo for the award. He notes that Duo Duo is a great lone traveler
crossing borders of nation, language, and history, 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.
Robert Con Davis-Undiano, WLT's executive director, adds that Duo Duo is
foremost among a group of first-rate Chinese poets who deserve serious
attention and recognition in the West.
Duo Duo (Li Shizheng) was born in Beijing in 1951. He started
writing poetry in the early 1970s as a youth during the isolated
midnight hours of the Cultural Revolution, and much of his early writing
critiqued the Cultural Revolution from an insider's point of view in a
highly sophisticated, original style.
