Taiwanese · 1969–1995
Qiu Miaojin was a Taiwanese novelist and filmmaker born in Changhua in 1969. She studied psychology at National Taiwan University, where she began writing fiction about love between women, and later moved to Paris to study at the University of Paris VIII. Her first book, Notes of a Crocodile (1994), follows a group of queer students in Taipei and won a major Taiwanese literary prize. She also published the story collection Prisoner of Love and the novel Last Words from Montmartre, a set of twenty letters written as she planned her own death. She died by suicide in Paris in 1995, at the age of 26. Her work was among the first to place lesbian life at the center of Chinese-language fiction, and it became a landmark for Taiwanese queer literature. English translations of Notes of a Crocodile and Last Words from Montmartre appeared in the 2010s and brought her a wide international readership.