Wang Anyi

Wang Anyi 王安忆
Born	March 1954 (age 61) Nanjing, China
Occupation	Novelist
Language	Chinese
Nationality	Chinese
Alma mater	Xiangming Middle School
Period	1978-present
Genre	Novel, prose
Literary movement	Xungen movement
Notable works	The Song of Everlasting Sorrow
Notable awards	4th Shanghai Literary and Art Award 1998 The Song of Everlasting Sorrow 5th Mao Dun Literature Prize 2000 The Song of Everlasting Sorrow 2nd Hong Kong The Dream of the Red Chamber Award 2008 The Age of Enlightenment 4th Hong Kong The Dream of the Red Chamber Award 2012 Tianxiang
Relatives	Father: Wang Xiaoping (王啸平) Mother: Ru Zhijuan

This is a Chinese name; the family name is Wang.

Wang Anyi
Traditional Chinese	王安憶
Simplified Chinese	王安忆
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin Wāng Ānyì

Wang Anyi (born in Nanjing in 1954) is a Chinese writer who is the chairwoman of Writers' Association of Shanghai.

Biography

The daughter of a famous writer and member of the Communist Party, Ru Zhijuan, and a father who was denounced as a Rightist when she was three years old, Wang Anyi writes that she "was born and raised in a thoroughfare, Huaihai Road." Due to the Cultural Revolution, she was not permitted to continue her education beyond junior high school. Instead, at age fifteen, she was assigned to be a farm labourer to a commune in Anhui, an impoverished province near the Huai River, which was plagued by famine.

Transferred in 1972 to a cultural troupe in Xuzhou, she began to publish short stories in 1976. One story that grew out of this experience, "Life In a Small Courtyard", recounts the housekeeping details, marriage customs, and relationships of a group of actors assigned to a very limited space where they live and rehearse between their professional engagements. She was permitted to return home to Shanghai in 1978 to work as an editor of the magazine Childhood. In 1980 she received additional professional training from the China Writers Association, and her fiction achieved national prominence, winning literary award in China. Her most famous novel, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, traces the life story of a young Shanghainese girl from the 1940s all the way till her death after the Cultural Revolution. Although the book was published in 1995, it is already considered by many as a modern classic. Wang is often compared with another female writer from Shanghai, Eileen Chang, as both of their stories are often set in Shanghai, and give vivid and detailed descriptions of the city itself.

A novella and six of her stories have been translated and collected in an anthology, Lapse of Time. In his preface to that collection, Jeffrey Kinkley notes that Wang is a realist whose stories "are about everyday urban life" and that the author "does not stint in describing the brutalising density, the rude jostling, the interminable and often futile waiting in line that accompany life in the Chinese big city". In March 2008, her book The Song of Everlasting Sorrow was translated into English.

In 2011, Wang Anyi was nominated to win the Man Booker International Prize.

Works

• Lapse of Time (Chinese: 蒲公英) (1988)
• Love in a Small Town (Chinese: 小城之戀) (1988)
• Love on a Barren Mountain (Chinese: 荒山之戀) (1988)
• Baotown (Chinese: 小鮑莊) (1989)
• The Song of Everlasting Sorrow (Chinese: 长恨歌) (1995)

Further reading

• Chinese Writers on Writing featuring Wang Anyi. Ed. Arthur Sze. (Trinity University Press, 2010).

References

• WANG, Anyi International Who's Who. accessed September 1, 2006. (Requires subscription)