Reading
Zhang Jie (Beijing/China)
In Chinese and German with translation.
Host: Eva Müller (sinologist, Berlin)
Zhang Jie worked at the ministry of industry in Beijing for twenty years and published China’s first feminist novel, "The Ark", in 1982.
She was born in 1937. Her mother was a teacher and her father a journalist. At the age of thirty-nine, after the Cultural Revolution had run its course, she published her first stories, which immediately caused quite a stir. In a somewhat ironic tone, she writes about the upheavals accompanying modernisation and about the fate of women. Her novel Leaden Wings triggered intense controversy when it appeared in 1981. However, it was subsequently awarded the Mao Dun Prize, the highest award for literature in China. In 2005, she became the only Chinese author to receive the Mao Dun Prize twice. This time it was for her long trilogy Wuzi (No Word), which provides a panorama of 20th century Chinese history in the form of a story about three women in three different generations.
Publications in English include:
- Leaden Wings (Virago, 1987)
- Love Must Not Be Forgotten. A collection including: Emerald - The time is not yet ripe - An Unfinished Record - Under the Hawthorne - Who Knows How to Live - The Ark (China Books & Periodicals, 1986)
