Yen Minju, born in 1958, in Kaohsiung, a seaport in south Taiwan, studied English at the Normal University. She has been living in Switzerland for more than twenty years. 

Yen Minju’s writing career started in 1998. Her very first prose piece, an account of a journey to the Caucasus, was published as a ten-day-series in the feuilleton of a daily newspaper in Taiwan. This successful debut marked a new phase of her life and enabled her to become an enthusiastic writing creature. Since then she has been writing on a one-book-in-18-months base, publishing in parallel numerous articles, prose essays, reports, comments in different Chinese newspapers and magazines; a report on the Cultural Revolution (in German) was published by NZZ (Neue Zürcher Zeitung) in Zurich in spring 2009. Her novel “Zurzeit bin ich nicht da” (in both German and Chinese versions) was first published as a serialized novel in two Chinese daily newspapers respectively in Taiwan and North America and is collected by the Literature House, Kaohsiung in south Taiwan and by the Library of Asian Studies of University Zurich. 

Unlike many Chinese women writers Yen Minju does not focus on writing about herself or her personal environment. Rather, she concentrates on topics of global pertinence and immerses herself in complex research before she starts writing.  

Yen Minju is known for her careful choice of words and her ‘crafting’ of formulations. Instead of ‘writing’ she is said to “engrave” words and to have the ability to so intensely depict situations that readers are “drawn in” and compelled to pay thorough attention to her texts. 

A probably unique contribution of Yen Minju to the Chinese literary landscape is her talent to craft ongoing international conflicts into literary contexts thus enabling readers to become aware of contemporary happenings while enjoying the fictitious narratives.  

Yen, Minju is a member of the Association of Chinese Writers in Europe, a member of the Independent Chinese PEN Center and one of the residents 2009 at Le Château de Lavigny Writers’ Residence, Lausanne, Switzerland.  
 
 

“A Perspective of Middle East from Switzerland” - an interview of Yen Minju aired on Feb. 3 2009

http://blip.tv/file/1730586    http://blip.tv/file/1734708     

Her official website: „Beyond Switzerland“ www.mjswiss.com

*****************

顏敏如文章的點擊率將近40萬