Professional Background Award-winning Tibetan writer and poet Woeser was born in 1966 in Lhasa, Tibet Autonomous Region, where her father was a soldier in the People’s Liberation Army. As a child of the Cultural Revolution, she was raised and educated entirely in the Chinese language, and never learned to read or write in her native Tibetan. Ironically, it is this that has enabled her to be such an influential voice, and she is said to be the first Tibetan to have played the role of public intellectual in China in the sense of using modern media. She writes to both a Han (Chinese) and a Tibetan audience, and her writings are said to give public expression for the first time to the emotions and experiences of a people and a culture previously hidden from the mainstream.

Woeser studied Chinese literature at the Southwest Nationalities College in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, and began her professional career as a reporter for the Ganzi (Tibetan: Kardze) Daily newspaper in the Tibetan province of Kham, (present-day Sichuan Province). In March 1990, she became editor of the Lhasa-based Chinese-language literary journal Tibetan Literature. This was the start of her political awakening. She began writing poetry, and read translations of foreign books smuggled into Tibet critical of the Chinese government. Woeser’s first book, a collection of poems entitled Xizang Zai Shang (Tibet Above), was published in 1999. She soon became a highly acclaimed and prolific writer in Chinese. Through her education, journalistic training and literary expertise, Woeser became a member Tibet’s “Chinese Writers’ Group,” a small literary elite of Tibetans writing in the Chinese language.

Current Status
Woeser was effectively barred by Chinese authorities from leaving China for Oslo to accept the Norwegian Author’s Union’s 2007 Freedom of Expression Prize, given at their annual meeting on March 8, 2008. On March 10, after demonstrations began in Lhasa and eventually swept through Tibet, she was placed under house arrest in Beijing. Though she continues to post entries to her blog, she has declined to speak to foreign media for fear of reprisals by the government.

Case History
Woeser’s troubles began with her second book Xizang Biji (Notes on Tibet), a collection of short stories and prose published in Guanzhou in January 2003. The book was a best-seller in China, and was banned in September of that year for revealing opinions “harmful to the unification and solidarity of our nation.” In June 2004 she was dismissed from her position at the Tibet Autonomous Region Literature Association, and left Lhasa for Beijing in order to “follow her conscience as a writer.” She continues to write from a small Beijing apartment where she lives with her husband, writer Wang Lixiong, posting poetry and essays on Tibetan culture and the political situation on the Internet and publishing her books in Taiwan. In mainland China her books are banned, her two blogs have been shut down, she is unemployed and her movements are sometimes restricted. Yet she has become widely known as one of China’s most respected writers on Tibet.