Qiu Miaojin

Qiu Miaojin (1969–1995) is a Taiwanese author whose two novels, Notes of a Crocodile and Last Words from Montmartre, have become cult classics of queer literature and Taiwanese avant-garde fiction — works of extraordinary emotional intensity that seem to have been written at the very limit of what the author could bear to say. She died by suicide in Paris at twenty-six, having left a body of work that feels both complete and brutally abbreviated.

Notes of a Crocodile, set in Taipei's lesbian underground of the late 1980s, uses the figure of a human in a crocodile suit — a creature that passes as non-threatening while hiding its true nature — as a sustained metaphor for the experience of queerness in a society that demands concealment. Last Words from Montmartre, written in the months before her death, is rawer and more personal. Both have found devoted international readerships in Bonnie Huie's translations and belong to the essential literature of queer experience.