PEN World Voices Festival presents LEGACY OF AN LGBTQ COUNTERCULTURAL ICON Bonnie Huie, Ari Larissa Heinrich, Eileen Myles
About This Show
As courts pave the way for the introduction of same sex marriage rights in Taiwan, the novels of Qiu Miaojin, who killed herself at age 26, open a door to a time of great change in Taiwanese culture, from the social and political vilification of LGBTQ people there to the underground explosion of gender and LGBTQ diversity. Bonnie Huie, translator of Qiu’s Notes of a Crocodile, and Ari Larissa Heinrich, translator of her Last Words from Montmartre, talk to poet and novelist Eileen Myles about an artist who has become a countercultural icon and whose work has had a lasting impact on literature and LGBTQ identity in Taiwan. Co-presented with the Ministry of Culture (Taiwan) and Taipei Cultural Center in New York.
Bonnie Huie is a translator of Chinese and Japanese. Her recent book, Notes of a Crocodile, a coming-of-age tale about queer misfits in late-1980s Taipei by Qiu Miaojin, has been longlisted for the PEN Translation Prize.
Ari Larissa Heinrich teaches in the Literature Department at The University of California, San Diego. His translation of Qiu Miaojin’s Last Words from Montmartre was published by New York Review Books in 2015.
Photo Credit: Eloise C. Dowd
Eileen Myles is a poet, novelist, and art journalist living in NYC and Marfa, TX. Afterglow (a dog memoir) was published by Grove in September 2017 and Evolution (poems) is due out in Fall 2018.