Qiu Miaojin (1969–1995) was one of Taiwan’s most innovative literary modernists, and the country’s most renowned lesbian writer. Her first published story, “Prisoner,” received the Central Daily News Short Story Prize, and her novella Lonely Crowds won the United Literature Association Award. While attending graduate school in Paris, she directed a thirty-minute film called Ghost Carnival, and not long after this, at the age of twenty-six, she committed suicide. The posthumous publications of her novels Last Words from Montmartre and Notes of a Crocodile (forthcoming from NYRB Classics) made her into one of the most revered countercultural icons in Chinese letters.
20/5/2025 Finished part 1 a month ahead of my graduation. I have so. many. feelings. She was so young. So young and so ambitious and passionate it tears my heart apart. Reading through the chapters and counting down in agony. It was torture but I enjoyed every bit of it.
6/7/2025 Almost done with this and I have to say what I love most is the cinephile in her