Qiu Miaojin was a landmark writer, as well as a literary pioneer for building positive queer identities in contemporary Taiwan. Born in 1969, she grew up in the later years of the White Terror, a time that greatly influenced her work. She began writing serious fiction in college, after which she moved to Paris to study psychology. Her literary creation never ceased, and she won several domestic prizes for both novels and novellas. Terms she coined, like “Lazi” and “crocodile,” were taken up by Taiwan’s queer community and made a part of that culture. Her longer works, such as Last Words from Montmartre and Notes of a Crocodile have been sold to the U.S., China, Japan, France, and Spain, and published in English as part of the New York Review of Books Classics Series.