Chinese · b. 1954
Wang Anyi was born in Nanjing to the writer Ru Zhijuan and grew up in Shanghai, then was sent at sixteen to a village in Anhui during the Cultural Revolution and spent years playing cello in a provincial arts troupe. She began publishing in 1976 and made her name with Baotown in 1985, a short novel about a village that turns a drowned boy into a model of filial piety. Her Three Loves trilogy in the late 1980s dealt with sex more openly than mainland fiction had since 1949. The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, published in 1995, follows a Shanghai beauty queen from 1946 to 1986 and won the Mao Dun Literature Prize. She has chaired the Shanghai Writers Association since 2001, teaches at Fudan University, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2011. She writes about Shanghai the way Eileen Chang did and disputes the comparison.