Living Without Dignity and Writing with Integrity

One of China's most successful writers, Yan will talk about writing fiction in China today.

Speaker/Performer: Yan Lianke

Sponsor: Center for Chinese Studies (CCS)

One of China’s most successful writers, Yan will talk about writing fiction in China today. He sees the people's loss of dignity within Chinese culture and under Chinese state power and compromises made by authors faced with this lack of dignity and loss of intellectual integrity. The question is how to compromise in life while remaining faithful in one's writing. In the real world, dignified writing can only come from heroic characters.

Born in 1958 in Henan Province, China, he is the author of many novels and short-story collection, including Serve the People!, and has won China’s two top literary awards, the Lu Xun for Nian, yue,ri (The Year, the Month, the Day), and the Lao She for Shouhuo (Pleasure). His most recent book, Lenin's Kisses, was listed as one of the top three books of 2012 by Evan Osnos of the New Yorker. Osnos comments: "This story of a village that decides to buy Lenin’s corpse is Yan at the peak of his absurdist powers. He writes in the spirit of the dissident writer Vladimir Voinovich, who observed that 'reality and satire are the same.'”
http://paper-republic.org/authors/yan-lianke/

Event Contact: ccs@berkeley.edu, 510-643-6321