Liao's next book, "The Ball and the Opium - Life and Death on Tiananmen Square," is to be released in Germany at the end of the year.

The subject of violence on Tiananmen Square is not new for Liao. On June 3, 1989, he composed the poem "Massacre" about the increasing demonstrations on the infamous square. The poem, which accurately foreshadowed the brutal crackdown that would occur the very next day, led to a four-year prison sentence for Liao.

Despite the hardships he faced in prison - including disease, torture, and his own two suicide attempts - Liao was not deterred from speaking up. In 1998, he was imprisoned again after publishing an anthology of underground poems written by Chinese dissidents, entitled "The Fall of the Holy Temple."

International attention on Liao increased when his "Interviews with People from the Bottom Rung of Society," collected in 1998, were banned in China and smuggled to Taiwan. There, they were published and later translated into English and French. In the following years, Liao was honored with a number of international prizes, including the Hellman Hammet Grant from Human Rights Watch and the Freedom to Write Award from the Independent Chinese PEN Center.