Xiaolu Guo interview: ‘Westerners have to read more non-western materials’

Born in a remote fishing village in south eastern China during the Cultural Revolution, Xiaolu Guo is now known as an artistic ‘one-woman industry’. Producing both films and novels, her work has made her one of the most successful Chinese writers published in Britain today, being listed in the Granta Best of Young British Novelists last year. Her first novel Village of Stone was originally written in Mandarin and portrays a young migrant who has moved to Beijing as she comes to terms with her difficult rural past amidst the sprawl of the megacity. It was following her own move to London in 2002, thanks to a British Council film scholarship, that Guo decided to start writing in English.

The result of her linguistic U-turn was A Concise English-Chinese Dictionary For Lovers, for which she most notably came to readers attention, being nominated for the Orange Prize. The ‘dictionary’ is in fact more of a diary.