China's contemporary literature has undergone tremendous changes in the last decades, and the past 30 years of reform and opening up has provided Chinese writers with both opportunities and challenges, a leading Chinese avant-garde poet and writer has said.
Han Dong, a prominent avant-garde poet, novelist and essayist from east China's Jiangsu Province, said the social environment in which the Chinese writers dwell has changed significantly over the past decades.
Sharing his literary adventures with a group of university students in London, he said: "The reason why I wrote my first novel was that I wanted to portray the lives of those most ordinary Chinese at that time. They tended to be the most vulnerable, with their voices unheard."
Han, who has adhered to a simple, subtle style of writing using plain language, added that today's serious writers in China face double pressures from cultural commercialization and lingering bureaucracy in the country's literary ecosystem.
Han Dong was born in Nanjing city, capital of Jiangsu Province, in 1961. Eight years later, his parents were sent down to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. Han moved with his family to a rural area in northern Jiangsu, a place to become a primary source of inspiration for his later works.
In 1978, when China began its new era of reform and opening up, Han was accepted into Shandong University where he studied philosophy.
Han traced his literary interest to a childhood reading Anton Chekhov, Mikhail Sholokhov and a bunch of other Russian writers, at a time when China was culturally heavily influenced by the Soviet Union.
When China opened its door to the outside world, Han, inspired by a tide of literary renaissance in the early 1980s, saw his first poem published at the age of 19, and went on to become an iconic avant-garde poet in contemporary China, with many of his poems translated into foreign languages and published overseas.
He has also enjoyed some popularity among Chinese teenagers, thanks to the fact that a couple of his poems have been selected into the country's nationally used high school textbooks of literature.
In 1993, he gave up his teaching job at a university and became a full-time writer. In recent years, he has expanded his creative realm by exploring different literary forms, completing a number of critically acclaimed novels, collections of essays and screenplays.
His writings have also won growing international recognition. His award-winning first novel "Banished!," a coming of age story based on his rural life in the 1960s and 1970s, was published in 2003, and then translated into English and Italian.
Nicky Harman, his British translator, said that translating Han's novel was like practicing a form of "meditation," which enabled her to enjoy the process of converting Chinese into English.
Rating the novel as one of her personal favorites, she commented that the book was "a lyrical, sometimes painful account of a boy growing up".
Hosted by Britain's cross-cultural events organizer Chinalink and the London Confucius Institute, Han gave a translation workshop in London on Wednesday, where he also introduced his bittersweet creative journey over the years and discussed a broad range of themes employed by contemporary Chinese writers, including body and soul, sexuality and homosexuality, feminism, abortion and so on.
Invited by the University of Leeds, he was also scheduled to meet students there and read from his recent works and answer questions along with Harman.
