The poetic work of Yang Lian, International Nonino Prize 2012, is one of the heights of Chinese contemporary thought.

Grounded to the millenary roots of his culture, he reinterprets it reinventing and opening it to the tensions of contemporaneity, touching in his lines all the great questions of our existence and reminding us that “poetry is our only mother tongue”.

He lives and writes as an exile not only from his land, pushing his view to the extreme limit.

An absolute exile and a distant profound poet far beyond our space-time.

(His poems are published in Italy by Scheiviller and Einaudi).

The prize is delivered by Adonis.