作家简介
Sun, Wei
One of China’s Most Original and Leading Voices
A former journalist, documentary filmmaker, and corporate general manager, Wei Sun is a novelist who tells stories of the most authentic contemporary Shanghai and China.
She was born and grew up in Shanghai. Since publishing her first fairy tale collection Story Cloud in 1992, she has published 31 books, including novels and short story collections. Her short story collection Rich in China was a bestseller in China in 2006. Her novel The Map of Time was a bestseller in 2017.
Her works have won over 10 national awards. She was the winner of the 2013 and 2017 Chinese Writers’ Erdos Prize for Literature for her novel Person in a Bottle and her novella “Night Persons”. Her novella “The Mirror” was the winner of the 2018 Novella of Beijing Literature Excellence Award.
Her novels The Temple of Impermanence and The Map of Time are in the process of being adapted into TV series and movies. Her novel Gold Belt is being made into a TV series, and set to air in the summer of 2025.
The Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the Free University of Berlin use her works, which include the novel The Confession of a Bear, the short story collection Rich in China, and the short stories “Who is in Whose Room” “My Funeral” “Bank Robbery” as teaching material at the Institute for Sinology and the Institute of Chinese Studies.
Her works have been translated into 6 languages. The English version of her novel The Confession of a Bear was published in the United States. Her novellas “Farewell” “Ignition” “The Second Son” “Magician” and the fairy tale “Elephants Walking on One-Way Road” were translated into English, German, Portuguese, French, Spanish, Danish and Bulgarian and published in the respective local literary journals.
She has been teaching literature, culture, and creative writing for over 20 years. She gave lectures, speeches, and readings at universities, institutions, and seminars in China, Ireland, the United States, Denmark, Switzerland, Latvia, Italy, and Germany, and has been honoured with 19 fellowships and scholarships from 15 countries, including Scotland, Sweden, New Zealand, Hungary, Romania, and more.
As one of the Shanghai intellectuals and middle class, Wei Sun has conducted a significant amount of research on social issues in contemporary China. She is acutely tuned to the many psychological issues of Chinese urban dwellers, and her works vividly reflect the loneliness, pride, and sense of alienation that these urban dwellers experience. The tension and horror of contemporary life that Wei Sun’s fiction reveals have caused a sensation in recent years.
Her research on traditional Chinese philosophy and contemporary Chinese society has also been published in academic publications and articles that include Malaise of Our Generation: An Analysis of the New Cultural Phenomenons of the Mass Media in Contemporary China, Love of Our Generation: An Analysis of the Cultural and Psychological Causes of the New Relationship Forms in Chinese Modern Marriages, and so on.
Wei Sun writes not only in Chinese but also sometimes in English and German. Starting in 2019, her poems written in English started to be published in European literary journals. Starting in 2023, her poems and stories written in German started to be published in German literary journals and anthologies.
She is currently living in Germany and pursuing her PhD in general and comparative literature at Saarland University.
