Poet Meng Lang, "who promoted Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, along with other dissident Chinese writers," died December 12, the New York Times reported. He was 57. Meng, "whose own writing has been published and translated into many languages, was a co-founder of the Independent Chinese PEN Center, a nonprofit organization formed in 2011 to promote freedom of expression and publication."
Meng helped edit the book A Compendium of Modern Chinese Poetry, 1986-1988, and was a writer in residence at Brown University from 1995 to 1998. He moved to Hong Kong in 2006 and to Taiwan in 2015. Among his last projects was an anthology of poems in Liu's memory, published this year in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Yibing Huang, an associate professor of Chinese at Connecticut College and a poet, told the Times that Meng "played an important, fearless role in championing an unorthodox, experimental and free-spirited poetry in China back in the 1980s. Although he had been living overseas since 1995, Meng Lang was widely respected and loved by poets, artists and friends in mainland China and overseas. He also contributed to the growth of a new diasporic Chinese poetry."
On Twitter, dissident Chinese novelist Ma Jian, who lives in London, wrote: "The exiled poet Meng Lang has passed away, but he has left behind a lot of poetry, his life's footsteps. As we walk along the path of these poems, we will see him again, this 'child of the sky.' "