The Creative Conversations Speaker series returns for its fifth year. All events are free and open to the public.
This series is sponsored by the Ferguson Bequest and programmed by Creative Writing at University of Glasgow.
- Books by featured authors will be for sale at the events (cash only) and in John Smiths bookshop.
- Follow the conversation on Twitter: @UofGWriting | #CreativeConversations
Creative Conversations: Xiaolu Guo
Creative Conversations: Xiaolu Guo
Creative Conversations
Date: Monday 03 February 2025
Time: 13:00 - 14:00
Venue: University Memorial Chapel
Category: Public lectures
Speaker: Xiaolu Guo
Website: www.eventbrite.co.uk/o/creative-writing-admin-team-8421705141
Xiaolu Guo is a novelist, essayist, screenwriter and film maker. She was born in south-eastern China in 1973 and studied Film at Beijiing Film Academy and the UK National Film & TV School.
Her novel in English translation, Village of Stone (2004), was shortlisted for the 2005 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the 2006 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. It was followed by her first novel written in English, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007), which tells the story of Z, a Chinese student‘s encounters in London and her inner journey of self-discovery. It was shortlisted for the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction.
Further novels followed: 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth (2008), which tells the tale of Fenfang, a film extra’s snapshots in Beijing, and was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize; UFO In Her Eyes (2009), a surrealist account about globalisation; a collection of short stories of solitary people in transit, entitled Lovers in the Age of Indifference (2010); and I Am China, a novel, which was published in 2014.
In 2017, she published her memoir Once Upon a Time in The East (the US edition entitled Nine Continents: A Memoir in and out of China which received the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography.The memoir is a chronicle of her growing up in China in the 1970s and '80s and her journey to the West.
In 2020, her novel A Lover's Discourse was released by Grove Atlantic in the US and Penguin Random House (Chatto) in the UK, and was shortlisted for the 2020 Goldsmiths Prize.
In 2021, her nonfiction Radical: A Life of My Own was released by Grove Atlantic in the US and Penguin Random House (Chatto) in the UK. It was followed by My Battle of Hastings in August 2024.
Her award-winning films include the feature films She, a Chinese (2009, Golden Leopard Award in Locarno Film Festival) and UFO In Her Eyes (2011), the latter adapted as a screenplay from her novel, and screened at international film festivals. Her documentaries include Once upon a time Proletarian (2009), We Went to Wonderland (2008), How Is Your Fish Today? (2006) and The Concrete Revolution (2004), which was awarded the Grand Prix in the 2005 International Human Rights Film Festival (France).