Yang Hongying

Yang Hongying (born 12 May 1962) is a best-selling Chinese writer of children's fiction, who has been called "China's J. K. Rowling."

Yang Hongying was born in 1962 in Chengdu, Sichuan Province.

She was the youngest daughter of Yang Tianxiao, an office clerk.

She credits her parents for giving her space and letting her develop freely.

By her own account, she did not read much in early childhood, but as a teen she became fascinated with Chinese classical novels such as Water Margin and Dream of the Red Chamber.

She read some sections repeatedly and studied how each character was introduced, which she said was helpful to her later writing.

After completing teacher training, she became a primary school Chinese teacher in 1980.

The Cultural Revolution had just ended a few years before, and there was a dearth of children's reading material outside the textbooks.

After teaching for a year, she began to write her own stories for the children.

Her first story was A Seed in a Swimsuit, about a lotus seed floating in its green swimsuit, inspired by the popular animated film Little Tadpoles Looking for Mama.

It was enthusiastically received by her class, and she wrote more than 100 stories in the next few years.

When a Shanghai children's newspaper began publishing her stories, she became more widely known and received a book contract.

After teaching for seven years, she started a new job at a publishing house as an editor of children's books.

In the early 1990s, she became chief editor at a children's magazine, and began writing a series of short stories known in English as Mo's Mischief, about a naughty but kind boy named Ma Xiaotiao (Mo Shen Ma in the English version).

She says the idea of Ma Xiaotiao came from one of the students she had taught.

In 2000, the publication of her A Girl's Diary brought her national fame.

The novel, about a preteen girl modelled after her own daughter, sold two million copies.

She also wrote the Diary of a Smiling Cat series starting in 2006, targeting children between seven and nine years old.

As of 2010, it had translated six books from the Mo's Mischief series into English and sold 200,000 copies of them.

In 2010, she ranked first in the "Fifth China Rich Writers List"

In 2012, she published a collection of essays "Reasons for Loving Zaizai".

As of 2013, her novels had sold more than 50 million copies, and she has been listed as one of the richest Chinese writers since 2006.

Her best-selling works are the Mo's Mischief (or Ma Xiaotiao) and the Diary of a Smiling Cat series.

This success has since been surpassed by her Mo's Mischief series, whose 20 titles had sold more than 30 million copies by 2013.

By 2013, she had written 18 books which sold 20 million copies.

HarperCollins has acquired rights to translate her works into other languages.

In November 2019, the enlightenment picture book "Panda Diary" was launched

Diary of a Smiling Cat series (the translations below are approximate)