Lao She

One of the towering figures of twentieth-century Chinese literature, Lao She (老舍) brought the rhythms and humor of Beijing street life into modern fiction with an ear no other writer could match. Born Shu Qingchun in 1899 to a Manchu family, he drew on his deep knowledge of the city's working class to create Rickshaw Boy — a devastating portrait of a rickshaw puller's doomed ambitions that remains one of China's most widely read novels.

Cat Country, his biting allegorical satire set on Mars, reads as startlingly contemporary. Mr Ma and Son — drawn from his years teaching in London — offers a wry, perceptive look at Chinese identity abroad. Lao She wrote with enormous compassion for ordinary people caught in extraordinary times, and his tragic death during the Cultural Revolution in 1966 robbed Chinese literature of one of its greatest voices far too soon.