Wang Anyi

Wang Anyi was sent to the countryside as a teenager during the Cultural Revolution's rural resettlement campaigns, an experience shared by her entire literary generation, before returning to Shanghai and beginning to publish fiction in the late 1970s, eventually chairing the Shanghai Writers' Association.

The Song of Everlasting Sorrow (1995) follows Wang Qiyao, runner-up in a 1940s Shanghai beauty pageant, across four decades of Communist rule, the Cultural Revolution, and the city's eventual reopening, tracking her doomed love affairs against the alleyway gossip and domestic texture of a Shanghai Wang Anyi renders in the lineage of Eileen Chang's prewar city fiction.

She has continued publishing steadily into her seventies while teaching creative writing at Fudan University, and remains one of contemporary Chinese fiction's most acclaimed chroniclers of Shanghai's twentieth century.