Read Poems by Bei Dao .
Bei Dao was born in 1949. He spent eleven years working as a construction labourer. He is one of China's most significant poets, and has lived in exile since the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. His work has been widely translated into English. His books in translation include The August Sleepwalker (1990), Old Snow (1991), Forms of Distance (1994), Landscape Over Zero (1996), and Unlock (2000). He is one of the founder editors of the literature journal Jintian, begun in 1978. Jintian published a new literature which expressed the importance of the imagination and of individual perception, long suppressed in the Chinese context. It was banned in 1980, and was later revived by Bei Dao in exile, and he continues to edit it today. He currently lives in Hong Kong.