About the guest authors
Li Jingrui
Li Jingrui was a journalist for eight years, reporting on legal affairs in China. She resigned in 2012 and turned to other forms of writing, including her own column in the Chinese edition of The Wall Street Journal. She now mostly concentrates on writing fiction. She has published a collection of short stories Tales of a Small Town, also a novel Small Town Girl, in which she tries to explore human feelings and fate, without steering clear of sensitive subjects. Her stories may be about the everyday lives of ordinary people in a small town in Sichuan, or about students exiled in New York. Her new works include a short story collection North Boulevard, a collection of essays Another World of Yesterday and novel Tiny Destiny.
Sun Wei
A former journalist, documentary filmmaker, and corporate general manager, Sun Wei is a novelist who tells stories of the most authentic contemporary Shanghai. She has published 23 books, many of which have won of awards, including the China Writers’ Erdos National Literature Award and the Beijing Literature Excellence Award, and she has attended writer-in-residence programs around the world, including the Iowa International Writers Workshop. The Map of Time was a best-seller in China in 2017. The Map of Time and Person in a Bottle are in the process of being adapted into TV series and movies by the sixth-generation director Zhang Yibai. The Confession of a Bear was published in the US. Her novellas Farewell, Ignition and Second Son were translated into English, French, Spanish, Bulgarian, and published in local literary journals.
Zhu Yue
Zhu Yue, born in Beijing in 1977, practised as a lawyer after graduating from university, but later became an editor. He began writing fiction in 2004, and has also published works on analytical philosophy. China is not short of writers who swear fealty to Borges, but Zhu Yue is one of the few whose work has the philosophical weight to substantiate the metafictional trimmings. Rarer still is the kind of dry humour he brings to his brief but highly evocative stories. To date, he has published three collections: The Bleary-Eyed Traveller, Masters of Sleep, and Chaos of Fiction. His work has also featured in People's Literature magazine and Chutzpah!
Wang Weilan
Wang Weilian, a representative figure among young Chinese writers, has published the novel The Rescued, short story collections Inner Face, Illegal Inhabitation, The Sound of Salt Forming, and more, for which he has won many literary awards. Whether it is his imaginative plot settings or his cold, pure and sharp language, all bring a strange and philosophical coloring to his fiction, lending his writing a very distinct style. His narratives are full of ideological and artistic tension, with a unique approach that combines the mysterious and the shocking.
Liu Jianing
Liu Jianing was born in Shenyang Province, Northeast China. “Pickle Fairy” is a penname she gave herself, for her love of sauerkraut. She is a humorous and award-winning author, publishing primarily on the Douban Read Platform, and is dedicated to a life as a storyteller. Her serial novel Matchmaking in the Zoo is a well-reviewed romance on Douban Read, with a score of 9.4 out of 10. The work was first published in serial digital form, and later published as a complete paperback. It is the story of 29-year-old Yingzhen Wu who relies on matchmaking to find her Mr Right. After meeting a virtual zoo of various men, true love still seems far out of reach.
Wen Junli
Wen is a senior manager in the advertising industry, and began writing in recent years. She lives in Beijing. Her published works include Good Man of Beijing and If You Like It, Pay for It! The latter is her her most-recently published novel, about a love affair between a middle-aged member of the elite and a pretty twentysomething. Her work is well-known for its mature insights into human nature.
Deng Anqing
Deng Anqing was born in 1984, in Hubei Province. He has experienced different types of jobs in different cities, from advertising and enterprise training, to wood industry and the book industry. His published works include: Kingdom on Paper, The Soft Distance, Candies Buried in the Mountain, I Met a Somali Pirate, and Seeing the Blossom. His works have been translated into several foreign languages.
Zhou Rui
Zhou Rui is a native of Nanjing, where he worked on ferries and barges before beginning to write fiction and poetry and, starting in his late 20s, children’s literature. In 1989 he took a job as an editor at the Shanghai People’s Art Publishing House. His more than 400 published works include The Python on the Stage, and the series Chinese Rabbit, German Hay, Giant Rat, Tiny Cat, The Kungfu-ists, The Stories of Calligraphy and more. He’s the recipient of more than 100 prizes: a three-time winner of the National Children’s Literature Excellence Award and a two-time winner of the Song Qingling Children’s Literature Award, in addition to other prizes including the New Era Prize for Excellence in Youth Literature, Taiwan’s Yang Huan Children’s Literature Award, France’s Annecy Educational Animation Prize, and many others.
Zhang Qingguo
A member of the China Writers Association, Zhang Qingguo is Chairman of the Kunming Writers Association, and head editor of Kunming’s Dianchi Lake literary journal. His principle works include Chrysanthemum Hall, Ghostlike, To the Wind, Dark Train, The Key’s Panic, The Troublemaking Rain, and The Watertown Butterflies, and he has been the recipient of multiple prizes including the October literary prize.
Chen Peng
In addition to being a novelist, Chen Peng is also a nationally-ranked soccer player, head of the Dayi Literature Academy, and vice-chair of the Kunming Writers Association. He has published the novella collection In For the Kill, the novel Knife, and a collection of soccer-themed stories entitled Who Doesn’t Love Paul Scholes. He has won the October literature prize, among others.
He Bin
Now a writer contracted to the Chongqing Literature Academy, He Bin is a senior journalist who was once named one of Chongqing’s Ten Best News Workers. He has published short stories and novellas in a wide range of influential literary journals including People’s Literature, Mountain Flower, Tiannan, and Writer, and has had fiction included in Selected Fiction, Selected Novellas, Changjiang Art and Literature: Best Fiction, and elsewhere.
Guo Shuang
Guo Shuang is a short story writer and essayist. Her stories and prose have been published in such journals as Harvest, Contemporary, Writer and Shanghai Literature. Her novella Parliament of Swine won the BenQ Film Fiction Award (2017), and the novella Bao Shijin was awarded the Best Young Author of Mountain Flower Biennial Award (2018). She has published the story collection Walking into Noontime Light and the non-fiction collection I am Willing to Learn to Tremble.