Yu Hua is one of China's most successful pioneer writers, renowned for his avant-garde style of language and structure, as well as themes about everyday people caught in a sinister web of history and traditions.

Yu was born in Hangzhou in 1960 and began to write in his twenties. Influenced by pressure from his parents he first worked as a dentist. But five years later he left dentistry to become a writer. In 1984 he published his first short story On the Road at Eighteen. His later works include To Live, Crying out in the Drizzle, Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, The Boy at Sunset and the most recently Brothers .   

Yu's novels have been translated into numerous languages and are popular in France, Italy, Germany, British, Japan and Korea. Some critics think he should be a candidate for the Nobel Prize for literature. To Live, perhaps Yu's most successful work, won the Grinzane Cavour Award in Italy in 1998. The novel was adapted into a movie directed by Zhang Yimou, which in turn won the Grand Jury and Best Actor prizes at the Cannes Film Festival in 1994.

via China.org