The Modern Novel

Biography

Perhat Tursun was born in 1969 in Atush, Xinjiang. He started writing poetry before switching to prose.
He attended college on a government scholarship at Minzu University in Beijing, where he learned to speak Chinese in order to read novelists and philosophers who that had been translated from other languages. His writing dealt with controversial subjects in a modernist style. After university he worked as a researcher at the Xinjiang People’s Arts Centre. He published a poetry collection called One Hundred Love Lyrics and story collection called Messiah Desert. His novel The Art of Suicide was very controversial with conservatives and he received death threats. Publishers refused to publish any more of his books for the next sixteen years.

In January 2018, he disappeared. Reports claimed that he been sentenced to sixteen years in prison.

Other links

Perhat Tursun
Perhat Tursun
Perhat Tursun
Perhat Tursun, Uyghur poet and writer sentenced for 16 years imprisonment
The disappearance of Perhat Tursun, one of the Uyghur world’s greatest authors
Uyghur Poetry in Translation: Perhat Tursun’s “Elegy”