Paper Republic - Paper Republic Guide to Contemporary Chinese Literature

2021 London Seattle

What is a guide, but an aid to a visitor to an unfamiliar land? The unfamiliar land in this case is Chinese literature, in its English translation; the visitor is the curious reader; and the guide is this one: the Paper Republic Guide to Contemporary Chinese Literature .

Paper Republic was founded by a group of translators in Beijing in 2007 as an online forum. It is now a non-profit, registered as a charity in the UK and with a global reach. The organization is independent, and is run by volunteers who, between them, have a fund of knowledge about contemporary Chinese writers and translation. Our goals are to tell readers whats good and available to read, and to encourage the highest standards of literary translation. In short, we identify the very best new Chinese writing and promote it in translation to the English-speaking world. In recent years, the field of translated Chinese fiction has begun to blossom, both in the number of translations and in the diversity of information sources. Which is where the Paper Republic Guide to Contemporary Chinese Literature comes in.

To help guide an interested reader, we have asked six writers to reflect on various themes and topics. In the introduction to the Guide , Xiaolu Guo looks back to her youth and how different authors influenced her writing life. Dylan Levi King examines the social and political roles Chinese authors have taken on since the May Fourth Movement of 1919, which marked the beginning of modern Chinese literature. Others write about genres they favor or have followed in the past. Emily Xueni Jin traces the development of Chinese science fiction and its place in the global world of science fiction. Rachel Cheung takes the reader into the online world of internet fiction that once captivated her. Ping Zhu takes a scholarly and sober look at womens writing as part of gender consciousness, while Andrea Lingenfelter leads us on a whirlwind tour of writings from Hong Kong. Each writer comes from a different background, and their contributions, together with the descriptions of the authors listed in the Guide , provide fascinating insights into contemporary Chinese literature.

These essays are supplemented by the directory of authors and publications in the second half of the Guide . Any document claiming to be a guide ought to state its criteria for what it has included and excluded first and most simply, we included any author mentioned by name by our essayists. Beyond that, we focussed on still-living Sinophone writers with publications in English, who have been active since the end of the Cultural Revolution, with a slight leaning towards Mainland China (for no other reason than the limits of our own knowledge), and with special dispensation given for a few major historical figures such as Eileen Chang and Lu Xun. We offer this limited slice of the full spectrum of Chinese literature in anticipation of future editions of the Guide , which we hope will expand in scope even as the field of Chinese literature in translation burgeons.

We are painfully aware that there are many other excellent authors who, for reasons of space, we have been unable to include. Please go to our website and database, Paper-Republic.org (https://paper-republic.org/), for a more comprehensive selection. In the meantime we sincerely hope that you, the reader, with the benefit of this edition, will find this land less unfamiliar, and be prepared to strike out into it unaided.

Eric Abrahamsen and Yvette Zhu

All members of the Paper Republic team worked on the Guide . At the time of writing, they were:

Eric Abrahamsen

Translator, publishing consultant and founder of Paper Republic. Eric is our Chair of Trustees.

Nicky Harman

Translator, educator and blogger.

Emily Jones

Translator, and consultant in brand and marketing

Jack Hargreaves

Translator

Yvette Zhu

Translator and author

Yao Lirong

Translator and Beijing correspondent

Dylan Levi King

Translator

Special thanks go to

Ms Yuan Shuang

Focal Point for Nanjing UNESCO Creative City of Literature and Director of Nanjing Literature Centre, for a generous donation

Duncan Hewitt

Journalist and translator, for
proof-reading and editorial advice

Dr Amy Mathewson

for help with copy-editing

Bai Liye

senior advisor for the Nanjing literature centre, for help with copy-editing.

And to the volunteers who wrote many of the author biographies, without whom we could not have completed the project.

They are:

Fenella Barber (FB)

Aoife Cantrill (AC)

Rene Elizabeth Clark (REC)

Markta Glanzov (MG)

Anna Gustafson (AG)

Terezia Hegerov (TH)

Mavis Lee (ML)

Bingbing Shi (BBS)

Catherine Xin Xin Yu (CXXY)

For further details about our volunteers, please see our website

All unattributed biographies were written by members of the Paper Republic team.