Bi Feiyu

Zhang Yimou's Shanghai Triad was scripted by a young Bi Feiyu, and film has kept coming back to his work since. Born in 1964 in Xinghua, Jiangsu, he began publishing in 1987 and holds a chair at Nanjing University. The Moon Opera turns on Xiao Yanqiu, a Peking opera singer who scalds a rival with boiling water, is pushed off the stage into twenty years of teaching, then is handed back the part of the moon goddess Chang'e when a cigarette factory owner pays for a restaging. Three Sisters follows the daughters of a village Party secretary through the Cultural Revolution and the years after it, each of them looking for a different way out. Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin translated both into English, and Three Sisters won the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2010. Bi took China's Mao Dun Literature Prize in 2011 for Massage, set among blind masseurs and filmed by Lou Ye in 2014, and France made him a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2017.