Chinese – A Celebration of Reading

Guo Xiaolu Guo: A new author, but one who has built up a following and has several titles in print and translated into English. I just finished reading her novel Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth and am eager to procure and read all her other works. Wikipedia writes that Xiaolu Guo:

“… is a British Chinese novelist and filmmaker, who uses cinema and literary language to explore themes of alienation, memory, personal journeys, daily tragedies and develops her own vision of China’s past and its future in a global environment. She is one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary literature in both Chinese and English. Her novels have been translated into more than 26 languages. She is one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2013.”

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Chinese author Mo Yan wins Nobel literature prize

Chinese writer Mo Yan has been named the winner of the Nobel Prize in literature. The Swedish Academy, which selects the winners of the prestigious award, on Thursday praised Mo’s hallucinatory realism, saying it “merges folk tales, history and the contemporary.”

Among the works highlighted by the Nobel judges were “Red Sorghum, (1993), “The Garlic Ballads” (1995), “Big Breasts & Wide Hips (2004).

Peter Englund, the Academy secretary, said: “He’s written 11 novels and let’s say a hundred short stories. If you want to start off to get a sense of how he is writing and also get a sense of the moral core in what he is writing I would recommend ‘The Garlic Ballads.’”

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