In China, there's a female writer. She is regarded as a leading member of post-80s writers. She enjoys the same (if not higher) fame with Han Han, Yan Ge & Zhang Yueran in China. Like her peers, she is an anticipated Chinese writer among Asymptote's Sinophone "20 Under 40"; her writing is warmly-discussed and recognized among translators of Chinese literature; her works have millions of sales in China.
Do you know her ?
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Her name is Di An.
Di An is a writer and translator. From 2010 to 2016, she also worked as editor-in-chief of ZUI Found, a bi-monthly literary magazine. Born 1983, in Taiyuan, Shanxi province, she is a daughter of two renowned Chinese writers, Li Rui and Jiang Yun. She studied in France for eight years, first in Sorbonne University, then EHESS, where she got her M.A. in Sociology in 2009.
Di An started writing during her first year in France. Then the year after, in 2003, her first work My Sister's Love Jungle appeared in Harvest magazine. By 2021, Di An has published fifty-eight works, long and short, winning her multiple awards, including Chinese Novel Biennial Award, Chinese Literature Media Award for Best New Writer, and People’s Literature Newcomer Prize for Novel.
Di An's voice is freshy, earthy, and highly intelligent. Like many millennials, she has matured with the approach of middle age, and her writing has a new depth and richness to it.
In 2018, Di An finished her seventh novel Jingheng Street. Unlike her earliest work, which has set in the fictional City of Dragon, the world of Jingheng Street is much more grounded and believable. This new work won her a People's Literature Award. This is the first time People's Literature Award given to an author at such young age. The last three recipients before her are Mai Jia, Bi Feiyu and Liu Zhenyun.
Jingheng Street is a love story happens in the vanity fair. It tells the story of a young woman, Zhu Lingjing, who goes through a series of life changes that span the 2010s – losing her job, finding another one, ending her affair with an unavailable man and getting married herself. She is somewhat adrift, but so is everyone around her –her airhead flatmate Xiao Pan, her lover (whose nickname is “Iron Man”), the minor pop-star she ends up with, and her hapless co-workers. The business venture they are all involved in, creating an app that will “turn being a fan into a career”, is a brilliant satire of both celebrity culture and trend-driven tech start-ups.
‘This (Jingheng Street) feels like the perfect moment to introduce her to the English-speaking world, where she can be received as an exciting new voice – a writer at the height of her powers.’
--Jeremy Tiang, novelist, playwright and translator from Chinese
‘The joy she reveals over the course of telling a story is that of a genuine intellectual — just as the sorrow she reveals is the grief of a true litterateur. This is a testament to her talent, a way for her to break new ground with her words, and ultimately nothing less than her inevitable destiny to achieve.’
-- Liu Heng, Lu Xun Literature Prize-winning author
‘Di An precisely and vividly portrays the things and people that exist in and around us, in a way that feels both warm and familiar. She is truly superb in that she can somehow capture moments of our own lives that we experienced but never wrote down ourselves. By infiltrating the realm of our psyche, she manages to hit us right in the soul.’
-- An Boshun, Scholar and Publisher of Wolf Totem
‘Di An’s work gives me the sense that she has undergone many profound experiences. Within her fiction, one can see these growing pains, as well as the special sort of bewilderment and loneliness unique to people of her generation’
-- Shao Yanjun, Scholar and Literary Critic
‘Beautiful yet disillusioning’
--Su Tong, writer of Raise the Red Lantern
‘…a tragic fairy tale- a ‘genre’ Di tackles in her oeuvre’
--Asymptote on Di An’s writing
Editor’s Word
This is a portrait of an absolutely contemporary China, especially of the fast-developing metropolis, yet its themes are universally resonant – from the workplace (the precariousness of employment, the reliance on technology) to the home (the impossibility of commitment, the loneliness of independence). It meets the perfect situation of translation literature -- many elements will feel familiar, yet the exact dynamics of the office politics, or the tensions between personal and work demands, play out in different ways.
Jingheng Street has strong potential for a crossover readership. We believe it could find readers in both trade market and literary fiction worlds. Comp titles include Weike Wang’s Chemistry and Joshua Ferris’s And Then We Came to the End – books that use humor to excavate the absurdities of 21st Century life.
