Yu Hua

Yu Hua is one of the most important and most translated Chinese novelists of his generation — a writer who came of age during the Cultural Revolution and whose fiction bears the marks of that catastrophic upheaval in its unsentimental confrontation with suffering, survival, and the absurdities that history inflicts on ordinary lives. Born in Zhejiang Province in 1960, he trained as a dentist before turning to fiction, and there is something of the clinical gaze in his prose: the capacity to observe damage without flinching.

His novel To Live (Huozhe, 1992) — translated by Michael Berry and filmed by Zhang Yimou — follows a man's life through the full arc of twentieth-century Chinese catastrophe, from the civil war through the Cultural Revolution, losing family members one by one to political violence and historical accident, yet continuing to live. It is one of the most devastating and most necessary novels of modern Chinese literature. Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, Brothers, and China in Ten Words have further demonstrated his range — the last an essential non-fiction account of Chinese society.