September 2025: Shuang Xuetao 双雪涛

Shuang Xuetao is one of the most highly celebrated young Chinese writers. Born in 1983 in the city of Shenyang, Shuang has written six volumes of fiction, for which he has won the Blossoms Literary Prize, the Wang Zengqi Short Story Prize, and, most recently, the Blancpain-Imaginist Literary Prize for the best Chinese writer under forty-five. His short stories and novellas, including “Moses on the Plain,” have been adapted into major television productions and feature films. Rouge Street, translated by Jeremy Tiang, was his first book to appear in English. Shuang lives in Beijing.

Bio from Macmillan Publishers

To coincide with our event on September 17th, when we're very excited to be welcoming Shuang Xuetao to Leeds, we're delighted to be featuring him on our Bookclub, with one of his stories, 'Bottlenose', translated into English by Jeremy Tiang and first published in Astra magazine.

(You can read it in Chinese here, and in Jeremy's English translation here)

The bar is quiet. I put on headphones and get to work on the ending to a short story. From a certain perspective, I'm a college professor now, and writing is just a hobby. Yet these are also the times I belong entirely to myself, with the sun and the wind, and ocean currents coursing through my body. Short stories are tunnels — they should finish with light at the end. I have written this three or four times but haven’t found the right form.

Shuang is one of a group of contemporary writers from the North East of China whose work has received plaudits and acclaim. This story, like much of his early work, is firmly rooted in his hometown of Shenyang. His story 'Hunter', also translated by Jeremy Tiang, was featured in Granta's 'China Issue' last year, which brought together key authors making waves in China today. (You can read more about this, as well as the story, in our December 2024 Bookclub feature).

His work has received a number of screen adaptations, and as part of our event on September 17th, we'll be screening an episode of a TV adaptation of part of his work, 平原上的摩西, which has the English title "Why Try to Change Me Now".

To find out more about Shuang Xuetao's visit to Leeds, please see our Events page.