Jia Pingwa

Jia Pingwa is one of contemporary China's most prolific and acclaimed novelists — a writer rooted in the landscapes and dialects of his native Shaanxi province. Ruined City, his controversial masterwork, portrays the moral and spiritual decay of a Chinese city through the dissolute life of a famous writer, earning both the prestigious Mao Dun Literature Prize and a government ban. Turbulence captures the upheaval of rural China during the reform era with equally unflinching honesty. Across a body of work spanning dozens of novels, Jia has become the literary chronicler of China's interior — its peasants, its dying villages, its ancient customs colliding with modernity. His prose carries the earthiness and vitality of the world he describes.