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Zheng Xiaoqiong © privat
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Zheng Xiaoqiong (b.1980 in the south-west Chinese province of Sichuan) unexpectedly won the major Liqun Literature Award in 2007. Until then she had been completely unknown in China’s literary life. Zheng Xiaoqiong began writing poems when she moved to Dongguan City in Guangdong Province in 2001 as a migrant worker and spent six years working in a hardware factory. Her experiences in those years became the material for her literature in her cycle The Book of the Women Workers. Her texts tell of the inhuman everyday life in the factories, of working in dispatch ports, on wire-cutting machines and conveyor belts under the “steady noise of ceiling lights”. It is engaged literature that gives a voice to the losers of Globalisation.
(For five poems in English see Poetry International website)