Chinese · 1924–2018
Zha Liangyong was born into a scholarly family in Haining, Zhejiang, was expelled from two schools for writing satires of officials, and left the mainland in 1948 for Hong Kong, where he worked as a journalist and film critic. In 1955 a colleague asked him to fill a newspaper serial slot and he wrote his first martial arts story. Between then and 1972 he produced fifteen novels that made him the most widely read Chinese novelist of the twentieth century — by any measure of copies, adaptations or readers, more than three hundred million books before counting the pirates. He also founded Ming Pao in 1959 and ran it as a serious newspaper for decades, writing editorials in the morning and swordsman fiction at night. He revised all his novels twice, sat on the committee that drafted Hong Kong's Basic Law, and took a Cambridge doctorate in his eighties.