Can Xue

Can Xue is one of the most radically original voices in contemporary Chinese literature — a writer whose dense, dreamlike fiction bears no real resemblance to anything else being written anywhere. Born Deng Xiaohua in Changsha in 1953 and largely self-educated (she spent years as a tailor before turning to writing), she has described her method as "soul writing": a surrender to the unconscious that produces texts of hallucinatory intensity.

Her novels and stories — including Dialogues in Paradise, The Embroidered Shoes, Frontier, and Love in the New Millennium — take place in worlds governed by nightmare logic, where characters pursue impossible tasks through landscapes that shift and contradict themselves. She has been compared to Kafka and Borges, though neither comparison quite captures her singular strangeness. Long championed by a devoted cult readership in the West, she has been a recurring finalist for the International Booker Prize.