Hai Zi

Pretty much unknown during his lifetime, Hai Zi/海子 (1964- 1989) has attained posthumous recognition as one of the most important figures in Chinese contemporary poetry. Born and raised in a farming village in Anhui Province, he passed the entrance exam to Beijing University at fifteen. At twenty, he started teaching philosophy and art theory at China University of Political Science and Law. During the last five or six years of his life, he wrote over two hundred haunting and memorable lyric poems and several epics. He committed suicide in 1989 by laying himself on a railroad track at Beijing Shanhaiguan. More than a dozen books of his work have been published posthumously.