Dubbed “China’s Thoreau,” Liu Liangcheng has sold well over one million copies of One Man’s Village alone and won top literary awards with subsequent works.
“We are living in a time of great change for humanity,” says Liu, “but I am interested in the things that remain unchanged in rural life.”
The author began with prose and poetry that mined his childhood memories of the small Xinjiang village where he grew up herding sheep by the desert. After a dozen years maintaining and dispatching tractors, in his thirties he left for the big city – Ürümqi – where he landed a job with the Workers’ Times. There he poured ten years into One Man’s Village, a collection of musings on wind, trees, animals and time, acclaimed by critics as a naturalist classic likened to Walden.
From his extensive travels came In Xinjiang, which captured the Lu Xun Literary Award – one of China’s top four literary prizes – in 2014. The deeply emotive essays portray the ordinary lives of people on this ancient land: the bustling bazaars, desolate desert ruins, the Uyghurs’ stark circumcision rite, and the seemingly endless supply of men dubbed Mehmet.
In 2018, Bearing Word marked another bold foray into fiction, starring a donkey and her keeper tasked with bringing a translated religious scripture tattooed on the young Jenny safely across an immense desert between two warring kingdoms. Singapore’s Balestier Press published the novel, rendered in English by the acclaimed translator Jeremy Tiang.
In 2023, the author won the Mao Dun Literature Prize – China’s most prestigious – with his novel Bomba, an ode to the lost innocence of childhood. Inspired by the ancient Mongolian Epic of Janggar, it is set in a paradise where aging and death are banished, and relates the games, dreams and memories of three boy heroes when they awaken.
Liu’s works have recorded impressive domestic sales, and also found overseas publishers:
One Man’s Village (essays)
Estimated China sales: 1m+ copies. Published in Korean, Arabic translation underway
Bomba (novel)
300,000+ China sales. Russian, Kazakh editions underway
Bearing Word (novel)
Published in English, Arabic and Macedonian, Turkish translation underway
凿空 is a Chinese novel by Xinjiang-based Liu Liangcheng (刘亮程), newly translated into English by Jun Liu (刘浚) and Bruce Humes. The working title is The Audible Annals of Abudan. To request an excerpt or information about foreign language rights, contact Yilin Press’s Ms. Yvonne Wang (王玉强) at wangyuqiang@yilin.com
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