Su Tong

Born Tong Zhonggui in Suzhou, Su Tong studied Chinese literature at Beijing Normal University and emerged in the mid-1980s alongside Yu Hua and Ge Fei as part of an avant-garde generation rejecting socialist realism for darker, more stylized fiction. His novella Wives and Concubines, about a young concubine's descent into a wealthy household's vicious hierarchy of rival wives, became internationally known once Zhang Yimou adapted it as the Oscar-nominated film Raise the Red Lantern.

He has returned repeatedly to closed, claustrophobic worlds of jealousy, decadence, and family cruelty (the novel Rice follows a similar descent through a rice-shop dynasty) and won the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2009 for The Boat to Redemption.

He remains based in China and continues to publish widely translated fiction alongside his early reputation as one of the country's defining post-Mao stylists.