ABSTRACT

Ge Fei, pen name of Liu Yong, was born on August 22, 1964 in Dantu, Jiangsu. His parents are barely literate peasants. Despite the poor educational environment in the rural hinterland, he was able to move to Shanghai to study Chinese literature at East China Normal University in 1981. From there, he graduated in 1985. But initially, his parents wanted him to be a carpenter in spite of his excellent schoolwork. Fortunately, his teacher intervened and persuaded his parents to send him to study at a better middle school in the district city. This lucky turn of events not only brought him to Shanghai, but moreover lay the ground for his later career as one of China’s most poetic, profound, and clairvoyant literary talents. 1 After nineteen years of studying, doing fieldwork, creative writing, publishing his early experimental novellas and teaching at East China Normal University, he received his Ph.D. from the same institution in 2000 with a thesis on Fei Ming (1901–1967), an important writer of modernist fiction between the 1920s and 1940s. Since then Ge Fei has taught at Tsinghua University. Currently he acts as head of the Chinese literature department and full professor at the Tsinghua School of Humanities. Ge Fei started writing in 1984, and quickly rose to fame as a member of a group of internationally renowned avant-garde writers during the 1980s including Mo Yan, Su Tong, Yu Hua, Zhai Yongming, and others. English translations of his work include Remembering Mr. Wu You, The Lost Boat, Whistling, Flock of Brown Birds and The Invisibility Cloak. 2 After his early experimental stories received broad critical acclaim during the late 1980s, he began traveling and offering lectures and readings to audiences in Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Moreover, his fictional works were complemented by several highly praised monographs of literary criticism on Chinese and world literature. He has won numerous awards for his literary works. Among them, the notable awards include the prestigious Lu Xun Literary Prize (2010–2013), Dream of the Red Chamber Prize (Hong Kong, 2012), Mao Dun Literature Prize (2015), and the most recent Best Novel of the Year Award (18th session) of the journal Dangdai for his latest novel, Waiting for the Spring Breeze (Wang chunfeng, 2016).