Diao Dou

Diao Dou was born in 1960 in Shenyang, Liaoning Province, China. Since graduating from the Beijing Broadcasting Institute in 1983, he has worked as a journalist and latterly as a literary editor. Although his first book was a collection of poetry, Aiqing jishi (‘Chronicles of Love’, 1992), he is best known as an author of novels and short stories. Diao Dou is wildly regarded as one of China’s leading satirists, praised for his refusal to follow any of the numerous literary trends that often dominate the Chinese literary scene. In 2003, he was awarded the ninth annual Zhuang Zhongwen Prize for Literature.