Born in a remote fishing village in south eastern China during the Cultural Revolution, Xiaolu Guo is now known as an artistic ‘one-woman industry’. Producing both films and novels, her work has made her one of the most successful Chinese writers published in Britain today, being listed in the Granta Best of Young British Novelists
Ben Fountain’s debut short story collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, was published in America eighteen years after he left his job at a Dallas real estate law firm to become a writer. It would appear that it was well worth the wait, as it immediately met with praise, awarded both the PEN/Hemingway and Whiting
Tan Twan Eng’s first novel was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, his second was shortlisted and then won the Man Asian Literary Prize. To say that his work over the past five years has received praise and attention would be something of an understatement. Likened to Ishiguro and Ondaatje, his work explores the point
In June 1981, the United States’ Centers for Disease Control noted in its weekly report that five ‘previously healthy’ young men in Los Angeles had been treated for pneumonia. Two of them had died. On the other side of the country lived soon-to-be third grader Marco Roth, the son of a doctor and musician. Receiving
There is a Persian proverb which states that ‘books are a man’s best friend.’ Persian literature from the kings of antiquity to the last Shah of the Peacock Throne has, for the most part, been dominated by its proverbial male companion. When presented with today’s Islamic Republic, an unfamiliar Western reader can easily believe that
A German Jew fleeing Nazism to America; a soldier in the D-Day landings; a US citizen moving to the GDR for the socialist cause; a writer denounced by the Party; a Berliner politician in a newly reunified Germany: all sound like separate characters in a novel, yet all apply to Stefan Heym, the pseudonym of
