Yu Hua

Yu Hua grew up in a small Zhejiang town where both parents worked at the local hospital, and spent his teenage years as a barefoot dentist, pulling teeth with minimal training for five years before deciding, he has said, that writers got to sleep in. He began publishing violent, formally experimental short fiction in the 1980s avant-garde scene before shifting toward the plain, folk-tale calm of his major novels.

To Live follows Fugui through civil war, famine, and the Cultural Revolution as he loses nearly everyone he loves, narrated with a flatness that makes the accumulating loss unbearable; Zhang Yimou's film adaptation was banned in China even as the novel became one of the country's most beloved exports. Chronicle of a Blood Merchant repeated the trick, following a man who sells his own blood again and again to keep his family alive.

Long banned or restricted at home for his bluntness about famine and political violence, he remains one of contemporary China's most internationally translated novelists.