Chinese · 1902–1988
Shen Congwen was part Miao and part Tujia, grew up in western Hunan among garrison towns and river traffic, and joined a local warlord army at fourteen, where his job for a time was recording executions. He arrived in Beijing in 1923 with almost no formal education, failed the university entrance examination, and taught himself to write by starving in a rented room. Through the 1930s he was among the most productive writers in China, publishing stories about boatmen, soldiers, prostitutes and country children in a style that refused both revolutionary slogans and metropolitan irony. After 1949 he was attacked as reactionary, attempted suicide twice, stopped writing fiction entirely, and spent thirty years at the Palace Museum studying costume, producing a definitive history of Chinese dress. He was reportedly close to a Nobel Prize when he died in 1988; the prize is not awarded posthumously.