Wu Ming-Yi

Wu Ming-Yi is a Taiwanese author, artist, and environmental activist whose fiction has established him as one of the most important literary voices in Asia. Born in Taipei in 1971, he writes novels that engage with the history, ecology, and indigenous cultures of Taiwan while achieving a universality of emotional resonance that has found readers across the world.

His novel The Man with the Compound Eyes (2011), translated by Darryl Sterk, is an ecological fable of exquisite beauty: a young man from a mythological island, a suicidal Taiwanese academic, and a floating island of Pacific trash converge in a narrative that is simultaneously a work of imagination and a work of mourning for a planet in crisis. His subsequent novels — The Stolen Bicycle and The Sage Hunter adaptations — have confirmed his status as one of contemporary literature's essential ecological voices. He is also a lepidopterist and artist, and his art and writing are inseparable projects.