Xiaolu Guo

Born toward the end of the Cultural Revolution in China, talented writer and director Xiaolu Guo relocated to the United Kingdom at age 29, with a scholarship for a film course there, and decided to write in English to reach a wider readership, due to limited options for people reading her either in the original or in translation. She had been raised by her grandparents in a poor fishing village and didn't meet her parents until almost seven, when they took her away to a worker compound in Wenling. She then worked hard to land a spot as a film student in Beijing, where she subsequently moved once again.During this time she also published poems inspired by the American writer Frank O'Hara and short stories, and wrote for a soap opera program . Her novels are influenced by the French nouveau roman and other 60s experimental fiction, with its distance, fragmentation and spareness, allowing more room for the reader's own imagination.