Liu Xiaobo as Poet:

His wife Liu Xia is also a poet, and it is through poetry they met and fell in love. When he was awarded the PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award in 2009, she wrote (in “The Poet in an Unknown Prison,” translated by Liao Tienchi, New York Review of Books, May 2009) of the hundreds of poems written by the two of them “born of the conversations between our souls” and said of her husband, “In my eyes, he has always been and will always be an awkward and diligent poet.” The section of his last statement addressed to his wife is a love poem in prose:

“I am serving my sentence in a tangible prison, while you wait in the intangible prison of the heart. Your love is the sunlight that leaps over high walls and penetrates the iron bars of my prison window, stroking every inch of my skin, warming every cell of my body, allowing me to always keep peace, openness, and brightness in my heart, and filling every minute of my time in prison with meaning. My love for you, on the other hand, is so full of remorse and regret that it at times makes me stagger under its weight. I am an insensate stone in the wilderness, whipped by fierce wind and torrential rain, so cold that no one dares touch me. But my love is solid and sharp, capable of piercing through any obstacle. Even if I were crushed into powder, I would still use my ashes to embrace you.”