Zhou Daxin (1952 – ) is a contemporary Chinese author and winner of several major literary honours including China’s highest award for literature, the Mao Dun Prize. Across his body of work – more than thirty novels and short stories – Zhou draws on his countryside roots and long military career for inspiration. Yet Zhou’s works also manage to surpass his upbringing. His piercing observations of Chinese society set characters in rural, urban and even allegorical environments, and touch upon challenging and often intimate humanitarian questions seldom dealt with by other authors of his generation.
This explains the success his stories have found in film and TV adaptations, and with international readers. More than half of his works have been adapted for the screen. One of the most popular, Women from the Lake of Scented Souls, directed by Xie Fei in 1993, became a Golden Bear winner at the Berlinale Film Festival, sharing the prize with Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet.