Bei Dao

Zhao Zhenkai was born on August 2, 1949, in Beijing. His pseudonym “Bei Dao” literally means “North Island” and was suggested by a friend as a reference to the poet’s provenance from Northern China, as well as his typical solitude.

Dao was one of the foremost poets of the Misty School, and his early poems were a source of inspiration during the April Fifth Democracy Movement of 1976, a peaceful demonstration in Tiananmen Square. He has been in exile from his native China since the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989.

Dao’s books of poetry include Sidetracks (New Directions, 2024), translated by Jeffrey Yang; The Rose of Time: New and Selected Poems (New Directions, 2010); Unlock (New Directions, 2000); At the Sky’s Edge: Poems 1991–1996 (New Directions, 1996), for which David Hinton won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets; Landscape Over Zero (New Directions, 1996); Forms of Distance (New Directions, 1994); Old Snow (New Directions, 1991); and The August Sleepwalker (New Directions, 1990). His work has been translated into over twenty-five languages.

Dao is also the author of short stories and essays. In 1978, he and colleague Mang Ke founded the underground literary magazine Jintian (Today), which ceased publication under police order. In 1990, the magazine was revived and Bei Dao serves as the editor-in-chief.

In his foreword to At the Sky’s Edge, Michael Palmer writes:

Anointed as an icon on the Democracy Wall and as the voice of a generation by the events of Tiananmen Square in 1989, and thereby also fated to exile, Bei Dao has followed a path of resistance that abjures overt political rhetoric while simultaneously keeping faith with his passionate belief in social reform and freedom of the creative imagination.

His awards and honors include the Aragana Poetry Prize from the International Festival of Poetry in Casablanca, Morocco, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has been a candidate several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and was elected an honorary member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. At the request of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, he traveled to Palestine as part of a delegation for the International Parliament of Writers.

Bei Dao was a Stanford Presidential Lecturer and has taught at the University of California, Davis, the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, and Beloit College in Wisconsin. In 2006, Bei Dao was allowed to move back to China.