Bill Porter

Finding Zen and Book Contracts in Beijing

Few people in the West have heard of Bill Porter, a translator of Chinese poetry and religious works whose works in print rarely sell more than a thousand copies each year. For most of the past decade, he says, his annual income has hovered around $15,000. Several of his books humorously thank the US Department of Agriculture—for providing food stamps that have kept him and his family going. But in China, Porter’s writings about Chinese hermits have recently gained him hundreds of thousands of readers, book contracts, and celebrity status, thanks to a small but growing new publishing culture for foreign authors.

May 29, 2012