The Swedish publishing firm Kaunitz-Olsson released a collection of 11 poems written by Gui Minhai, the Swedish-Hong Kong bookseller currently imprisoned in China after being convicted of providing illegal information to foreign countries in February.
The collection is dubbed ‘I draw a door on the wall with my finger’.
The poems were written by the Hong Kong-born Swedish citizen while he was serving his first prison sentence. The themes of the 11 poems, that are printed in both Swedish and Chinese, vary from longing for Swedish forests, Norse Myths, fondness of Swedish culture to reflections on his imprisonment, with a stanza of a poem reading: “It would be embarrassing to stop writing poems because the poetry has been caged”
Kaunitz-Olsson reports, that Gui Minhai memorized the poems while in prison and smuggled them out to his daughter after haven written them down, when he was released for a short while.
Source: Hong Kong Free Press
