Eight Poems Available to Purchase

Ekhmetjan Osman's poetry has been immensely influential among two generations of Uyghur poets. Active in the Uyghur separatist movement in Xinjiang, he was forced into exile by the Chinese state in the mid-1990s. He lived in Syria for a decade, and two of his eight poetry collections were written in Arabic. Although he has translated the poems of Rumi, Adonis, Octavio Paz, Paul Celan, and Fernando Pessoa into Uyghur, the leading influences on his work are usually said to be Baudelaire and the French Symbolists. Ekhmetjan now lives in Canada. Joshua L. Freeman, a historian of modern China, is an assistant research fellow at the Academia Sinica Institute of Modern History in Taiwan. He is currently completing a monograph titled “The Poetry of Power: Uyghur National Culture in Twentieth-Century China.” His translation of the Uyghur poet Tahir Hamut Izgil's memoir Waiting to Be Arrested at Night was published in 2023.

Joshua L. Freeman, a historian of modern China, is an assistant research fellow at the Academia Sinica Institute of Modern History in Taiwan. He is currently completing a monograph titled “The Poetry of Power: Uyghur National Culture in Twentieth-Century China.” His translation of the Uyghur poet Tahir Hamut Izgil's memoir Waiting to Be Arrested at Night was published in 2023.