Stephen Owen (born October 30, 1946) is an American sinologist specializing in Chinese literature, particularly Tang dynasty poetry and comparative poetics.
[1] Owen graduated from Yale University in 1968 and continued at Yale as a graduate student, receiving his doctorate in 1972 under Hans Fränkel.
He has been a Fulbright Scholar and received a Guggenheim Fellowship,[2] among many other awards and honors.
[4][5] He was jointly awarded the 2018 Tang Prize in Sinology with Yoshinobu Shiba, "for his penetrating scholarship and theoretical ingenuity in Classical Chinese prose and poetry, especially Tang poetry and its translation.
[3] Harvard Magazine reported in 1998 that colleagues saw Owen as "a soaring and highly imaginative free spirit," comparing him to the eighth-century Chinese calligrapher Huaisu and to the foremost Tang dynasty poet, "the unfettered, convention-defying Li Bai..."[9] Of The Poetry of Meng Chiao and Han Yü, James J. Y. Liu said that it "represents a remarkable achievement, especially for a first book..."[10] A reviewer in China Review International wrote "reading Stephen Owen's The Making of Early Chinese Classical Poetry shocked me, the way a seismic shift in paradigms will.