 Liu
Sola was born in 1955, the daughter of influential figures
in the Communist Party. She spent most of her childhood and adult
life in Beijing and graduated from the Central Conservatory of
Music in Beijing in 1983. A woman of many talents, a singer,
composer, vocalist and novelist, Liu established her place in
the history of modern Chinese literature with her first novella
"You Have No Choice", which won the 1988 Chinese National
Novella Award. It is a work which single-handedly introduced
a notion of hip into Chinese writing and gave voice to the radically
different sensibilities of a whole post Cultural Revolution generation.
Her work received not only high critical praise but also became
cult reading for the young as it provided an exciting diversion
from the more conventional type of contemporary Chinese fiction.
In her apparent refusal to deal with serious subjects seriously,
Liu reveals a spirit of defiant rebelliousness which is particularly
appealing to the younger generation of Chinese readers. It is
a sort of Catch 22 and Catcher in the Rye set in the Chinese
context, a Chinese version of the "Angry Young Man"
fiction so popular in Britain in the late 60s and early 70s.
But behind her frivolity lie the questions of what to write and
how to write, which , as writers in a communist regime will know,
are questions of crucial political significance. In 1988 she
went to England and has since settled in London |
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