Chinese · b. 1994
Yan Ge is the pen name of Dai Yuexing, born in Chengdu in 1984. She published her first collection at seventeen and wrote six books in Chinese before moving to Britain and Ireland, where she began writing in English. The Chengdu novels, of which The Chilli Bean Paste Clan is the best known in translation, are set in a fictionalised version of her home province and are written in a Sichuanese-inflected register that translators have described as the central difficulty of her work. Elsewhere, her first book written in English, is a short-story collection ranging across centuries and continents. She holds a doctorate in comparative literature and has been named among China's best young novelists.