Women Writing China: Outside Society

We're delighted to be supporting this event, organised by Sinoist Books, in association with Tilted Axis Press.

Featuring authors Li Juan 李娟 and Yan Ge 颜歌 alongside their translators Christopher Payne and Jeremy Tiang, we will be discussing their most recently published works and how their experiences as Chinese women writers have influenced and taken shape in text.

All welcome, but please reserve your ticket on Eventbrite, and you will be sent the Zoom link before the event.

(Please note that this event will be recorded).

Featured books:

Li Juan [trans. Christopher Payne], Distant Sunflower Fields (Sinoist Books). Get it here.

Yan Ge [trans. Jeremy Tiang], Strange Beasts of China (Tilted Axis Press). Get it here.

About the speakers

An acclaimed essayist, Li Juan was first published in 1999, and has since written more than ten essay collections. Her work often details her personal experiences of the landscape and Kazakh nomads of Xinjiang's Altay region. Providing rare insight into the community, her work has been widely praised for its contribution to the genre of narrative non-fiction. Distant Sunflower Fields [trans. Christopher Payne] will be published in 2021 by Sinoist Books.

Yan Ge was born in Sichuan, China in 1984. She is a fiction writer in both Chinese and English. Yan’s first short story collection was published in China when she was seventeen. She is the author of thirteen books, including six novels. She has received numerous awards, including the prestigious Maodun Literature Prize (Best Young Writer). She was named by People’s Literature magazine as one of twenty future literature masters in China. Her work has been translated into English, French and German, among other languages. The English translation of her latest novel The Chilli Bean Paste Clan was published in 2018 with Balsetire Press. Her novella White Horse, which was published by HopeRoad Press in 2019, was shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2020. Her novel Strange Beasts of China came out via Tilted Axis Press in 2020.

Yan started to write in English in 2016. Since then, her writing has been published in The New York Times, The Irish Times, TLS, Brick, The Stinging Fly and elsewhere. She has an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, where she is the recipient of the UEA International Award 2018/19. Yan lives in Norwich with her husband and son.

Associate Chair of English and Chinese Translation at the University of Toronto, Christopher Payne has a background in East Asian Studies, with a particular focus on cultural production from the People's Republic of China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Dr Payne has translated authors such as Mai Jia and Jiang Zilong. His academic work can be found in the journals Modern Chinese Literature and Culture and Positions: Asia Critique.

Jeremy Tiang's translations from Chinese include novels by Yeng Pway Ngon, Zhang Yueran, Yan Geling, Chan Ho-Kei, Li Er and Lo Yi-Chin. He also writes and translates plays. His novel State of Emergency won the Singapore Literature Prize in 2018. He lives in New York City.