Tsering Woeser – författare

Ocean, as Much as Rain presents for the first time in the English-language world a collection of masterfully translated literary writings by prominent Tibetan writer Tsering Woeser. In these stories, lyrical essays, and poetry, Woeser interweaves texts, photographs, silences, and documentary details. Featuring a distinctively imaginative use of satire and digressive rhetoric, Woeser’s stories bring to life Tibetan characters whose lives are entwined with politics, history, and religion. Woeser illuminates the ruins and places that she has come across during her various sojourns in Chinese-ruled Tibet, reviving sites from the past of her parents and their generation. These writings range from ingenious retellings of cultural encounters and confrontation to insightful commentaries on ecological issues and tourism in Tibet that never shun contradictions, dilemmas, or questions about the future. With an introduction by Fiona Sze-Lorrain and an author interview by editors-translators Sze-Lorrain and Dechen Pemba, Ocean, as Much as Rain is a landmark publication that celebrates the work of a steadfast dissident and a leading Tibetan literary figure of our times.

Ocean, as Much as Rain presents for the first time in the English-language world a collection of masterfully translated literary writings by prominent Tibetan writer Tsering Woeser. In these stories, lyrical essays, and poetry, Woeser interweaves texts, photographs, silences, and documentary details. Featuring a distinctively imaginative use of satire and digressive rhetoric, Woeser’s stories bring to life Tibetan characters whose lives are entwined with politics, history, and religion. Woeser illuminates the ruins and places that she has come across during her various sojourns in Chinese-ruled Tibet, reviving sites from the past of her parents and their generation. These writings range from ingenious retellings of cultural encounters and confrontation to insightful commentaries on ecological issues and tourism in Tibet that never shun contradictions, dilemmas, or questions about the future. With an introduction by Fiona Sze-Lorrain and an author interview by editors-translators Sze-Lorrain and Dechen Pemba, Ocean, as Much as Rain is a landmark publication that celebrates the work of a steadfast dissident and a leading Tibetan literary figure of our times.

Access the glossary of Tibetan terms.Access the glossary of Chinese and English terms.Access the Index.   When Red Guards arrived in Tibet in 1966, intent on creating a classless society, they unleashed a decade of revolutionary violence, political rallies, and factional warfare marked by the ransacking of temples, the destruction of religious artifacts, the burning of books, and the public humiliation of Tibet’s remaining lamas and scholars. Within Tibet, discussion of those events has long been banned, and no visual records of this history were known to have survived.In Forbidden Memory the leading Tibetan writer Tsering Woeser presents three hundred previously unseen photographs taken by her father, then an officer in the People’s Liberation Army, that show for the first time the frenzy and violence of the Cultural Revolution in Tibet. Found only after his death, Woeser’s annotations and reflections on the photographs, edited and introduced by the Tibet historian Robert Barnett, are based on scores of interviews she conducted privately in Tibet with survivors. Her book explores the motives and thinking of those who participated in the extraordinary rituals of public degradation and destruction that took place, carried out by Tibetans as much as Chinese on the former leaders of their culture.Heartbreaking and revelatory, Forbidden Memory offers a personal, literary discussion of the nature of memory, violence, and responsibility, while giving insight into the condition of a people whose violently truncated history they are still unable to discuss today.

Since the 2008 uprising, nearly one-hundred and fifty Tibetan monks have self-immolated in protest of the Chinese occupation of their lands. Most have died from their wounds. "If Tibetans saw even a sliver of an opportunity to hold demonstrations, then they would not resort to self-immolation," Woeser, the dissident Tibetan poet, has written in the New York Times. The Tibetans she references includes herself: a prominent voice of the Tibetan movement, and one of the few Tibetan authors to write in Chinese, Woeser has been placed under house arrest and lives under close surveillance. Tibet On Fire is her account of the oppression Tibetans face, and the ideals driving both the self-immolators and other Tibetans like herself. Angry and clear, Tibet On Fire is a clarion call for the world to take action.