Liao Yiwu is a Chinese poet, prose writer, and musician who for many years was one of the most persecuted writers in the People’s Republic of China. Following poetry he wrote in connection with the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, he was imprisoned for four years. After his release he spent more than a decade conducting interviews with people pushed to the very bottom of the Chinese social ladder — those the communist system preferred to render invisible. In 2011 he fled to Germany. His books are banned in China.

The Corpse Walker is a collection of nearly thirty interviews with figures from the margins: the title character — a professional mourner who escorts souls to the next world — opens a gallery that includes a grave robber, a fortune-teller, a thief, a prostitute, a beggar, a prisoner, a Falun Gong practitioner, a human trafficker, and many others. These are people who would never appear in the media, because they do not fit the image of Chinese success and social harmony.

Liao Yiwu — himself pushed to the margins by the system — could speak with his interlocutors as an equal. His interviews are simultaneously a portrait of centuries-old tradition and of China’s complex recent history: stories of everyday life, superstition, magic, hunger, imprisonment, and survival compose a picture of the country radically different from the one Beijing wishes to show the world.

Liao Yiwu’s style draws on oral tradition, on the rhythm of the spoken word and street storytelling. His reportage is literature without euphemism — raw, at times brutal, always on the side of those whose voices no one wants to hear.