Su Tong

Few writers capture the violence and beauty of China's past with the sensory intensity of Su Tong (苏童). Born in Suzhou in 1963, he emerged as a leading voice of the Chinese avant-garde in the late 1980s, writing fiction that is lush, brutal, and hypnotic in equal measure. Raise the Red Lantern — the novella collection that inspired Zhang Yimou's iconic film — remains his most famous work internationally, a claustrophobic portrait of women trapped in a wealthy household.

Rice follows a rural migrant's ruthless ascent through the rice trade of 1930s Nanjing, while My Life as Emperor reimagines dynastic China through the eyes of a child ruler. Su Tong's prose has a feverish, almost hallucinatory quality — his China is a place of silk and mud, desire and decay. He writes historical fiction that feels less like reconstruction than possession.