Yan Lianke’s Novelsįew authors in the entire world right now have the imagination and courage of Yan Lianke. As a result, publishers in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore frequently pick up and publish his works.Īll of this is to say that Yan Lianke is an author of extreme political venom, with the wit and wisdom to deconstruct and expose cracks in the recent history, political structure, and economic system of his own nation.įor all of his battles with censorship in his home country, what we in the English speaking world have is an uncensored library of some of the best Chinese novels ever written. It’s rare for Yan Lianke’s books to be published in mainland China. There is nobody in the world like Yan Lianke.Įnglish translator of Yan’s novels, Carlos Rojas, has remarked that, “several of Yan Lianke’s own works had run into problems with the authorities … following the publication of his 2004 novel Lenin’s Kisses, which describes a harebrained plan to purchase Lenin’s embalmed corpse from Russie and use it as the basis for a Chinese tourist site, Yan was dismissed from his position with the People’s Liberation Army … His following novel, Serve the People!, which offers a parody of Maoist rhetoric during the Cultural Revolution, never got through the censors … his 2006 novel about China’s rural AIDS epidemic, Dream of Ding Village, was initially published but then recalled.” Here is a writer of deep scepticism, who uses his genius of plotting, writing, setting, and characterisation to challenge the norms of the world he was born into.Ĭhinese historian Jung Chang called Yan Lianke “ One of the masters of modern Chinese literature” and with good reason. His novels and stories are all inescapably, and heavy-handedly, political. He has been writing since the age of twenty, and has produced some of the greatest works of Chinese fiction ever penned. Yan Lianke, acclaimed author of some of the best Chinese novels of all time, was born in Henan province (where most of his books are set) in 1958 and now lives in Beijing. But then, it only takes a cursory read of any one of his novels to understand why. Yan Lianke, however, is one of the unlucky few.
Some, like sci-fi writer Chen Qiufan, have managed to avoid it entirely, though they may not know why.
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