He is a major figure among "The Third Generation Poets" that came after the Misty Poetry movement of the early 1980s.
His work has been translated into Bulgarian, English, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Swedish, Danish, and Japanese.
[1] Born in Kunming, China, on August 8, 1954, Yu Jian's schooling was interrupted in 1966 by the Cultural Revolution.
He became a factory worker in 1969, where frequent power failures enabled him to read voraciously.
He studied in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, at Yunnan University, and was a literary activist, organising events and editing publications.