Wang Anyi

Wang Anyi is one of the most important living Chinese authors, a writer whose career spans four decades and whose work has mapped the history of Shanghai — its glamour, its losses, its layered memory — with unmatched intimacy. Born in Nanjing in 1954 and raised in Shanghai, she experienced the Cultural Revolution as a teenager, and its shadow falls, directly or obliquely, across much of her fiction.

Her masterwork Song of Everlasting Sorrow (1995) — winner of the Mao Dun Literary Prize — follows a Shanghai beauty queen across the decades of the twentieth century, using one woman's life to illuminate the fate of a city and an era. Wang writes about the domestic and the intimate with enormous seriousness, convinced that private life is where history is truly felt. She has taught at Fudan University and is widely considered a strong Nobel contender.