Xiaolu Guo

Xiaolu Guo FRSL (born 20 November 1973 ) is a Chinese-born British novelist, memoirist and film-maker, who explores migration, alienation, memory, personal journeys, feminism, translation and transnational identities.

Guo has directed a dozen films including documentaries and fiction.

Her most well-known films include She, a Chinese and We Went to Wonderland.

Her novels have been translated into 28 languages.

In 1993, she left her province to study at the Beijing Film Academy (in the same class as Jia Zhangke) and later on studied Documentary Directing at the National Film and Television School in the UK.

She moved to London in 2002 and has lived in Paris, Zurich and Berlin.

Doris Lessing spoke highly of the book in 2004: "Reading it rather like finding yourself in a dream."

The Times Literary Supplement praised the novel: "The language has the pared-down simplicity of a Fable; the effect is a bit like that of a Haruki Murakami novel."

Guo's 2004 film is The Concrete Revolution, a film essay about the construction workers in Beijing building stadiums for the 2008 Olympics.

Guo's 2005 autobiographical novel, Village of Stone focuses on two people, Coral and Red, who live together in Beijing, and how Coral's life changes one day when she receives a dried eel in the post, an anonymous gift from someone in her remote home village.

Guo's 2008 novel, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, is the first one that she wrote in English after publishing her Chinese books.

It tells the journey of a young Chinese woman in London.

She soon renames herself "Z" and her encounters with an unnamed Englishman spur both of them to explore their own sense of identity.

The novel is written in the heroine's broken English to begin with, in a dictionary form.

With each chapter her English gradually improves, reflecting the improvement of the heroine's own English over the year in which the novel is set.

American writer Ursula Le Guin reviewed the book in The Guardian: "We're in the hands of someone who knows how to tell a story [...] It succeeds in luring the western reader into an alien way of thinking: a trick only novels can pull off, and indeed one of their finest tricks."

Her 2009 novel UFO In Her Eyes, set in a semi-real Chinese village, is an experimental meta-fiction in the form of a series of police interviews about an alleged UFO sighting.

The novel was adapted into a feature film, produced by Turkish German filmmaker Fatih Akin and directed by Xiaolu Guo herself.

It received the Best Script Prize at the Hamburg International Film Festival.

Guo's 2010 novel, 20 Fragments of A Ravenous Youth, is a coming-of-age story about a 21-year-old Chinese woman Fenfang, her life as a film extra in Beijing, to where she has travelled far to seek her fortune, only to encounter a Communist regime that has outworn its welcome, a city in varying degrees of development, and sexism more in keeping with her peasant upbringing than the country's supposedly progressive capital.

Guo's 2010 book, Lovers in the Age of Indifference, is a collection of short stories that depicts the lives of people adrift between the West and the East, set in various locations.

Guo was a guest of the DAAD Artists in Residence in Berlin in 2012 and a Writer in Residence of the Literaturhaus Zurich and the PWG Foundation in Zurich in 2015.

She is currently a Writer in Residence of East Asian Department, Columbia University and a Visiting Professor at Baruch College, CUNY in New York City.

In 2013, she was named as one of Granta magazine's Best of Young British Novelists, a list drawn up once a decade.

It was one of NPR's Best Books of 2014.

In 2015, Xiaolu Guo published the novel I Am China, which she describes as "a parallel story about two Chinese lovers in exile – the external and internal exile that I had felt since leaving China".

In the book, the London-based literary translator Iona Kirkpatrick discovers a story of romance and revolution as she translates a collection of letters and diaries by a Chinese punk musician named Kublai Jian.

Unbeknownst to Iona, Jian has come to Britain seeking political asylum, while another character, Mu, is in Beijing trying to track him down.

As the translator tracks the lovers' 20-year relationship, she develops a sense of purpose in deciding to bring Jian and Mu together again before it is too late.

Xiaolu Guo has served on the judging panel for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and in 2016 she served as a jury for the Financial Times Emerging Voices Awards for Fiction.

She has lectured on creative writing and film-making at King's College, London, the University of Westminster, Zurich University, Bern University, Swarthmore College in the United States and Harvard University.

She is an honorary professor at the University of Nottingham and a guest professor at the University of Bern in Switzerland.

Nine Continents: A Memoir In and Out of China won the National Book Critics Circle Award 2017.

In 2017, she published her memoir Once Upon a Time in the East (the US edition entitled Nine Continents: A Memoir In And Out Of China), which is a chronicle of her growing up in China in the 1970s and '80s and her journey to the West.

She is one of the inaugural fellows of the Columbia Institute of Ideas and Imagination in Paris, 2018, and a jury member for the Man Booker Prize 2019.

She is currently a visiting professor and Writer-in-Residence at Columbia University in New York City.

Xiaolu Guo grew up with her illiterate grandparents in a village of fishermen, then with her parents and brother in the city of Wenling, both in the Chinese coastal province of Zhejiang.

Her father was a traditional landscape ink painter and her mother was a Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution.

She published her first poetry collection in her teens while studying ink painting.

In 2020, her novel A Lover's Discourse was released by Grove Atlantic in the US and Penguin Random House (Chatto) in the UK.