Qiu Miaojin

Qiu's writing laid significant groundwork for the terminology and discussion of lesbianism within modern Chinese language and popular culture.

Qiu Miaojin studied at University of Paris and National Taiwan University. The recorded working language is Standard Chinese, Chinese and English. The field of work recorded is literary activity, prose and journalism. Haruki Murakami is recorded as an influence. Places of work recorded in the authority are France and Paris. Works named in the authority record are Notes of a Crocodile.

Originally from Changhua County in western Taiwan, Qiu attended the prestigious Taipei First Girls' High School and National Taiwan University, where she graduated with a major in psychology. She worked as a counselor and later as a reporter at the weekly magazine The Journalist. In 1994, she moved to Paris where she pursued graduate studies in clinical psychology and feminism at University of Paris VIII, studying with philosopher Hélène Cixous. Qiu died by suicide at age 26. Most accounts suggest that she stabbed herself with a kitchen knife.

Qiu Miaojin's writing is influenced by the non-narrative structures of avant-garde and experimental film as well as European and Japanese literary modernisms. Her novels contain camera angles and ekphrasis in response to European art cinema, including allusions to directors such as Andrei Tarkovsky, Theo Angelopoulos, Derek Jarman, and Jean-Luc Godard. During her time in Paris, Qiu directed a short film titled Ghost Carnival. In 2021 the original 16mm film was found in the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute's archives and digitized. Currently, her works as a filmmaker are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Her best-known work is Notes of a Crocodile, for which she was posthumously awarded the China Times Literature Award in 1995. The main character's nickname, Lazi, was later adopted as a slang term for "lesbian" in Chinese. Notes of a Crocodile was published in 1994, amid a Taiwanese media frenzy surrounding lesbians, including an incident in which a TV journalist secretly filmed patrons at a lesbian bar without their consent, resulting in some suicides, and the group suicide of two girls, rumored to have been lesbians, from the elite high school attended by several characters in the novel and by Qiu herself. Along with her final work before her death, Last Words from Montmartre, the novel has been widely described as "a cult classic." Last Words From Montmartre is an epistolary novel that comprises 20 letters that can be read in any order, drawing on the notion of musical indeterminacy. Its prose appears to "blur distinctions between personal confession and lyric aphorism" according to a review in Rain Taxi. Dated between 27 April 1995, and 17 June 1995, about a week before the author killed herself, the letters begin with the dedication: "For dead little Bunny, and Myself, soon dead." It has been described as a work of relational art and noted for the required presence of the reader, "a 'you' to narrate to" that is a signature of Qiu's works.

Lonely Crowd《寂寞的群眾》(1990) A Carnival of Ghosts《鬼的狂歡》(1991) Notes of a Crocodile《鱷魚手記》(1994) - translated by Bonnie Huie (New York Review Books Classics, 2017) Last Words from Montmartre 《蒙馬特遺書》(1996) - translated by Ari Larissa Heinrich (New York Review Books Classics, 2014)

"Cage"《囚徒》(1988) - translated by Shengchi Hsu (Strangers Press, 2024) "Platonic Hair"《柏拉图之发》(1990) - translated by Fran Martin in Angelwings: Contemporary Queer Fiction from Taiwan (University of Hawai'i Press, 2003)