October 2025: Yao Emei 姚鄂梅

Yao Emei is from Hubei province and currently based in Shanghai. She writes for adult and YA audiences, with her YA novel Tilted Sky being published in English translation by Kelly Zhang (2024). Yao’s other novels include As High As The Sky, Eager to Fly and 1958: Old Love Letter. She has won the People's Literature award and the Shanghai Literature Excellent Novella Award, and her works have been translated into English, Russian, German, Japanese and Korean. Originally published in 2021, her collection of novellas The Unfilial: Four Tragic Tales from Modern China made various top-ten lists, including review website Douban’s 2021 Annual Reading List for Chinese novels, as well as QQ Reading's 2021 Annual Top Ten Fiction Books. It has just been translated into English (by Honey Watson, Martin Ward, Olivia Milburn and Will Spence) and is published by Sinoist Books (2025).

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We're delighted to be featuring Yao Emei as our author of the month this October, especially as she'll be visiting us in Leeds to take part in this year's symposium, Challenging Narratives: Chinese Children’s Literature in Anglophone Contexts.

You can read an extract from The Unfilial here in the original Chinese, as well as in Martin Ward's English translation.

In her latest collection of short stories set in contemporary China, award-winning writer Yao Emei reveals that, as goes the song, “it’s hard to be a woman”, but not just sometimes: all the time. Alternately macabre, heart-rending and shocking, the four tales comprehensively skewer the aspirational notion of the happy family. No matter how hard Yao’s female characters work to get married, have children and put the rice on the table, they are continually thwarted by their menfolk generating crises which their long-suffering wives, mothers and daughters must clean up.

Review from the Asian Review of Books

You can also read more about the stories in this review from The World of Chinese.

We're also very honoured that translator Kelly Zhang will be joining us in Leeds for the symposium, and we're looking forward to hearing her discussing her translation of Tilted Sky, Yao's YA novel.

You can read more from Kelly in this interview with Avery Fischer Udagawa, on World Kid Lit.

I believe Tilted Sky will resonate with young readers as well as adult readers, because it leverages the specific and personal to tell universal truths—a hallmark of great children’s literature and indeed, of all great literature. While many kids (fortunately) haven’t grown up under severe neglect, abuse and poverty, it is a painful reality for many others. Furthermore, all children have at some point of their young lives experienced feelings of frustration, shame, confusion, disappointment, grief, loneliness… These are the authentic and universal aspects of human experience that Bai Jian’s voice speaks to, and that we can all relate to. To ignore or deny the presence of painful emotions and struggles in our children is to be deceitful and disingenuous, and to do a great disservice to all of humanity.