Chinese · b. 1952
Jia Pingwa grew up in a peasant family in Danfeng County, Shaanxi, and was kept out of school during the Cultural Revolution because his father was labelled a counter-revolutionary. He got into Northwest University in 1972 and has written about rural Shaanxi and the city of Xi'an ever since, in a dense classical-inflected prose full of local dialect that makes him one of the hardest contemporary Chinese writers to translate. Ruined City, published in 1993, sold enormously, was banned within months for its sex scenes and its portrait of intellectual rot, and stayed banned for seventeen years. He kept writing through it — Shaanxi Opera, Happy Dreams, The Lantern Bearer — and has won the Mao Dun Literature Prize, the Pegasus Prize and France's Prix Femina Étranger. He has a reputation in China for producing a substantial novel every two or three years and for never leaving his subject.