Liao Yiwu

In May 2011, poet and novelist Liao Yiwu was prevented from visiting the Sydney Writers’ Festival after Chinese authorities refused to grant him an exit permit. It was the sixteenth time he’d been prevented from leaving the country.

Now living in exile in Germany, one of the world’s most compelling voices will visit Australia for the first time, free to speak his mind about contemporary Chinese society. Liao Yiwu is the author of the celebrated collection The Corpse Walker and Other True Stories of Life in China. His writing bears witness to a hidden China and connects readers to a people living on society’s bottom rung.