Word: xingjian
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International interest in China's contemporary visual arts has hit exuberant heights, which makes the relative international ignorance of contemporary Chinese literature more conspicuous. Contemporary Chinese writing remains woefully undertranslated in English. Expectations for a translation boom, created when émigré Chinese writer Gao Xingjian won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000, remain unfulfilled. So what is an ambitious Chinese writer who desires to reach an international audience to do? The 35-year-old Xiaolu Guo has taken matters into her own hands by writing in English. As a novelist who is equally at home as a filmmaker...
...still growing in France. Earlier generations of French writers - from Molière, Hugo, Balzac and Flaubert to Proust, Sartre, Camus and Malraux - did not lack for an audience abroad. Indeed, France claims a dozen Nobel literature laureates - more than any other country - though the last one, Gao Xingjian in 2000, writes in Chinese...
Close watchers of the Nobel Prize for Literature look at the selection process as a kind of geopolitical checkers match, as the Swedish Academy plucks major figures from the national literatures of far-flung countries: China (Gao Xingjian, 2000) Trinidad and Tobago (V.S. Naipaul, 2001), Hungary (Irme Kertesz, 2002), South Africa (J.M. Coetzee, 2003), Austria (Elfriede Jelinek, 2004), England (Harold Pinter, 2005), Turkey (Orhan Pamuk, 2006). By choosing Doris Lessing in 2007 the Academy has scored a triple: she was born in Iran, known then as Persia, in 1919; raised in Zimbabwe, known then as Rhodesia; and lives...
...invaluable resource. China's post-Tiananmen generation has produced precious few serious authors, and virtually none who can write with Li's fluency in English. It seems that exile has become a requirement for China's most honest writers?the country's only Nobel prizewinner, Gao Xingjian, lives in France?but Li's exile may prove short-lived. In 2004 Li applied for permanent residency in the U.S., but her first attempt was denied on the grounds that she had not sufficiently distinguished herself in her field of endeavor to earn a green card. (She still has a valid temporary...
...this flowering been perceived by those left behind in China? Perhaps it hasn't even been noticed. Four years after U.S.-based Ha Jin won a National Book Award and three years after France-based Gao Xingjian was honored with the Nobel Prize in Literature, the work of these two internationally hailed Chinese authors is still largely unseen inside China. Sadly, the China-born authors now emerging on the world's literary stage remain largely unknown inside their native country. Some are still banned...