Wai-lim Yip

Who is Wai-lim Yip?

Wai-lim Yip, also known as Yeh Wei-lien and Ye Weilian, is a Chinese poet, translator, critic, editor, and professor of Chinese and comparative literature.

Yip was born in Guangdong province, China, and at the age of twelve moved to Hong Kong, where he started writing poetry and was active on the poetry scene. He graduated from National Taiwan University and went on to National Taiwan Normal University, where he did a thesis on T.S. Eliot and translated "The Waste Land." In 1963 he went to the United States to attend the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, whose director, Paul Engle, went to Taipei to negotiate permission for Yip's wife Tzu-mei and their daughter to leave Taiwan; he received an MFA in 1964. He then did graduate work at Princeton University, receiving a PhD in comparative literature in 1967. In the same year he joined the faculty of University of California, San Diego, with which he has been affiliated ever since. In 1970 he returned to National Taiwan University as a visiting professor of comparative literature. In 1980 he joined the Department of English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong as a visiting professor. Since then, he has visited mainland China many times, teaching comparative literature at Peking University and Tsinghua University.