Yang Mu

Wang Ching-hsien (王靖獻; September 6, 1940 – March 13, 2020), known by his pen name Yang Mu (Chinese: 楊牧; pinyin: Yáng Mù), was a Taiwanese poet, essayist, critic, translator, Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the University of Washington, and founding dean at NDHU College of Humanities and Social Sciences and HKUST School of Humanities and Social Sciences. He is considered one of the most accomplished poets writing in Chinese in the 20th and 21st century, known for his lyricism and linguistic ingenuity, modernising the Chinese diction and syntax while reviving a sublime style out of the idiom and imagery of Chinese and Western poetic traditions. Yang Mu was praised by Swedish Academy member Göran Malmqvist, who translated his work into Swedish, as the closest Taiwanese poet to the Nobel Prize. He was the first Taiwanese winner of Newman Prize for Chinese Literature (2013) and Cikada Prize (2016).