Jingfang Hao 郝景芳
Jingfang Hao is a popular female Chinese science fiction writer. She won the prestigious Hugo Award in 2016 for her novel Folding Beijing (折叠北京).
Miss Hao was born in 1984 in Tianjin, China. She graduated from Tsinghua University with a BS in physics. She then received her PhD in Economics and Management in 2013 from Tsinghua as well. She is very interested in economic inequality in China and works for the China Development Research Foundation.
Translated Titles by Jingfang Hao
Vagabonds is about a group of teenagers who are sent to Earth as delegates from Mars after the Martian war of independence a hundred years ago. They are caught between the two worlds, unable to reconcile the beauty and culture of Mars with their experiences on Earth.
Cixin Liu 刘慈欣
Cixin Liu is a well-known Chinese science fiction writer. He is a 9-time winner of China's Galaxy Award for science fiction writing. In 2015, he received the internationally prestigious Hugo award for his novel titled The Three-Body Problem or 三体 and became the first Asian writer to win this prize.
Liu was born in Beijing in 1963. He graduated from the North China University of Water Conservancy and Electric Power with a BS and became a computer engineer at a power plant in 1985. He wrote quite a few of his sci fi novels while working there. He cites the English writers George Orwell and Arthur C.Clarke as important literary inspirations.
Translated Titles by Cixin Liu
The Three-Body Problem first takes place in China during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s – a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens, and an alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the signal and plans to invade Earth. While on Earth, different camps start forming around whether to welcome the superior beings and help them take over a world seen as corrupt or whether to fight against the impending invasion.
Anyi Wang 王安忆
Anyi Wang or 王安忆(born in 1954) is a contemporary Chinese female writer who covers a variety of topics in her short stories and fiction novels. At the early stage of her writing career, she wrote about the lives of young people who went from cities to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. Her stories were heavily based on her own life experiences. Majority of her pieces are about life in Shanghai. Her writing style seeks to tell the stories of ordinary people while deeply reflecting human nature and the innate kindness of human beings. Her works have won several major literary awards in China and some were translated into German, French and English.
Translated Titles by Anyi Wang
长恨歌 - The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai
This book is considered one of Wang’s best works. The story follows the life and romantic encounters of a woman living in a changing Shanghai for about four decades of the twentieth century. The book was adapted into a 2005 film titled Everlasting Regret, and a 2006 TV series titled To Live to Love. It was translated into English by Michael Berry and Susan Chan Egan.
This book is about the daily lives of individuals who migrated from the countryside into the big city of postwar Shanghai. It depicts the detailed life of a young woman finding herself in this international city and the hardships of surviving in the city to fulfil her dreams of living in Shanghai.
Zhang Jie 张洁
Zhang Jie or 张洁; (7 April 1937 – 21 January 2022) is a Chinese novelist and short story writer. She was one of China’s first contributors to feminist fiction. In her works, she used her unique perspective to create various female images with different life paths and destinies and explored the lives of women in contemporary China. She was the only female writer who won the “Mao Dun Literature Prize” twice. Some of her novels were translated into many languages including English. She is also one of the earliest writers to publish novels about China’s reform during that special period of time in Chinese history. The Heavy Wings or Leaden Wings (沉重的翅膀) is my favorite work of hers.
Translated Titles by Zhang Jie
沉重的翅膀 - Heavy Wings or Leaden Wings
In this book, Zhang Jie describes the different types of people at the beginning of China’s reform after the Cultural Revolution. This includes their lives, reform ideas, relationships between workers and company leaders, journalists and the society as a whole. It is a fascinating story with vivid language, and heavily based on her own experiences. I highly recommend this book and it is hard to put down once you start it.
爱是不能被忘记的 - Love Must Not Be Forgotten
This story expresses two types of love: a love between a daughter and her mother, and the love between the mother and her lover, a senior official in the Communist Party. Out of gratitude and duty, the senior official married the fiancée of an honored soldier who gave his life to protect him. It is a truly riveting piece.