Shen Congwen

Shen Congwen, of mixed Han, Tujia, and Miao descent, grew up in remote Fenghuang, Hunan, and joined a local warlord's army as a teenager, witnessing mass executions that never left him. With barely a grade-school education he arrived in Beijing in the early 1920s determined to write, taught himself the craft through sheer persistence, and eventually became a university professor despite never finishing school.

Border Town, his gentlest and best-loved novel, followed a boatman's granddaughter courted by two brothers in a riverside Hunan town: pastoral tenderness written just before his world changed completely.

After 1949 the new Communist authorities denounced him as an apolitical aesthete; he attempted suicide, abandoned fiction altogether, and spent the rest of his career as a museum researcher cataloguing ancient Chinese costume. Rediscovered internationally in the 1980s, he was reportedly on course for the Nobel Prize when he died in 1988, months before that year's award.