Big Picture: Contemporary China With Author Yan Lianke

Yan Lianke is one of the most internationally acclaimed Chinese authors. He started out as propaganda writer for the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) aged 20 – and was released from his duties two decades later due to his satirical novels addressing issues and absurdities in modern China. He is a controversial writer of a genre he coined as "mythorealism" with the life of people living in China, often in a rural setting, at its core. His essays are outspoken, his fiction critical, causing some of his works to be banned in China. But both nationally and internationally, he has won numerous literary awards – among them the Franz Kafka Prize, the Lu Xun Literary Prize, the Royal Society of Literature International Writer Lifetime Award, and the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature.

Yan Lianke will join us for a reading of Xin Jing / Heart Sutra, his most recently published novel in English about the tension between religious belief and the state in today's China, and a conversation about his writing.

Yan Lianke was born in 1958 in Song County, Henan province. He joined the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) aged 20 but was expelled from the army for his fiction in 2004 after the publication of his novel Lenin's Kisses. He is also the author of numerous novels and short-story collections, including Serve the People!, Dream of Ding Village, The Four Books, The Explosion Chronicles, The Day the Sun Died and Hard Like Water. He has been awarded the Royal Society of Literature International Writer Lifetime Award, the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature, the Hua Zhong World Chinese Literature Prize, the Lao She Literary Award, the Dream of the Red Chamber Award and the Franz Kafka Prize. He has also been shortlisted for the International Man Booker Prize, the Principe de Asturias Prize for Letters, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the FT/Oppenheimer Fund Emerging Voices Award and the prix Femina Étranger. Yan Lianke teaches at Renmin University in Beijing and at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

About Big Picture

Big Picture is a quarter-annual, public event series where we celebrate art in all its forms and shapes: Be it food, movies, museums, or literature. We invite artists, curators, and experts to talk about their practices and how these can help shed light on the world we live in. These talks are designed to further the dialogue and exchange across disciplines and regions and to travel beyond the events.

Partners

The Big Picture event series is made possible with the support of Bergos and hosted in cooperation with Karl der Grosse.

This Big Picture event is hosted in cooperation with Zentrum für literarische Gegenwart ZLG and Sinokultur.