Xiaolu Guo
| Xiaolu Guo | |
|---|---|
Guo at the 2014
Brooklyn Book Festival |
|
| Born | 1973 China |
| Occupation | Novelist, filmmaker and essayist |
| Period | 1987-present |
| Website | |
| www |
|
Xiaolu Guo (simplified Chinese: 郭小橹; traditional Chinese: 郭小櫓; pinyin: Guō Xiǎolǔ) born 1973) is a Chinese-British novelist and filmmaker, who explores alienation, memory, journeys, translation, transnational identity. Her novels have been translated into 27 languages. In 2013 she was named as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists, a list drawn up once a decade. [1]
Guo has served on the judging panel for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and in 2016 she served as a jury for the Financial Times Emerging Voices Awards for Fiction. She has lectured on Creative Writing and Filmmaking at King’s College,London, the University of Westminster, Colgate University, Swarthmore College in the USA and Harvard University. She is an honorary Associate Professor at the University of Nottingham. Guo lives in London and was a guest of the DAAD Artists in Residence in Berlin in 2012 and a Writer in Residence of the Literaturhaus Zurich and the in Zurich in 2015.
Guo's 2005 autobiographical novel, Village of Stone focuses on two people, Coral and Red, who live together in Beijing, and how Coral's life changes one day when she receives a dried eel in the post, an anonymous gift from someone in her remote home village. Doris Lessing spoke highly of the book in 2004: ‘Reading it rather like finding yourself in a dream.’ Times Literary Supplement prasied the novel: ‘The language has the pared-down simplicity of a fable; the effect is a bit like that of a Haruki Murakami novel.’
Guo's 2008 novel, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary For Lovers, tells the journey of a young Chinese woman in London. She soon renames herself "Z" and her encounters with an unnamed Englishman spur both of them to explore their own sense of identity. The novel is written in the heroine's broken English to begin with, in a dictionary form. With each chapter her English gradually improves, reflecting the improvement of the heroine's own English over the year in which the novel is set. Ursula K Le Guin reviewed the book in the Guardian: ‘We're in the hands of someone who knows how to tell a story… It succeeds in luring the western reader into an alien way of thinking: a trick only novels can pull off, and indeed one of their finest tricks. [2]
...
Wikipedia