About the Author

YAN LIANKE is the author of the memoir Three Brothers and numerous novels and novellas, including Hard Like Water, The Day the Sun Died, The Explosion Chronicles, The Four Books, Lenin's Kisses, Serve the People!, Dream of Ding Village, and The Years, Months, Days. Among many accolades, he was awarded the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature and the Franz Kafka Prize. He was twice a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize, and he has been shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the Man Asian Literary Prize, and the Prix Femina Étranger. He has also received two of China's most prestigious literary honors, the Lu Xun Prize and the Lao She Award.

Reviews

Praise for Heart Sutra: Winner of a PEN Translates Award
Named a Best Translated Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews "A warm-hearted, if not gentle, satire that skewers religious institutions without mocking faith itself . . . Heart Sutra starts out seeming like a romantic comedy; by its end, it has moved through absurdity, darkness, and body horror into a strange and flickering form of hope. All this variety lets Yan, a career-long satirist, avoid the trap most common to his chosen form. Satirical novels too often start and end on the same note, which effectively guarantees a loss of momentum. Not true in Heart Sutra. Guessing its next development is no likelier than guessing who will win the next Nobel -- and it is a deeply satisfying read as a result . . . Yan's storytelling has a luminous, irrepressible quality."--Lily Meyer, NPR "A Bildungsroman wrapped in a fable wrapped in a morality play. In the spirit of the Buddhist text that shares its name, Heart Sutra (which first appeared in Chinese in 2020) embraces paradox, impermanence and the ways in which the human and divine realms mutually constitute each other."--Rhoda Feng, Times Literary Supplement "[A] riff on the traditional campus novel . . . Plotlines jostle for space in this eclectic 'mythorealist' work, which the author himself has described as 'a combination of solemnity and vulgarity' . . . Heart Sutra expresses concern over the prospect of amnesia. What happens, it seems to ask, when religious belief is perverted by political influence, when faith remains, but the gods no longer remember us?"--Financial Times "Two-time Booker Prize finalist Yan Lianke expertly meshes the whimsical and the mystical in Heart Sutra, a beautifully illustrated novel in which the disciples of China's five main religions gather for a year-long intensive study and a religious--and literal--tug-of-war."--Sloane Crosley, Departures Magazine "A book of many faces . . . Has startling pleasures . . . In Lianke's hands, similes are sharp, synaesthetic and anchored in the lives of the characters."--Frank Lawton, Telegraph "Subversive satire of the collision of Chinese state bureaucracy, academia, and religion . . . Picaresque, but with serious matters of faith, love, and political wrangling at its fast-beating heart."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "With beautiful papercut illustrations, satirical humor, and allegorical prose, Lianke's brilliantly reimagined campus novel showcases the author's masterful storytelling, which uses realism and fantasy to explore the intersection between religious and secular beliefs."--Booklist "Open up to the first page of any Yan Lianke novel, beautifully translated by Carlos Rojas, and you'll feel confident that you're in the hands of an assured and timeless storyteller. There's always something deeply psychological about his books--like he's probing at a desperate part of the psyche that most prefer to leave alone."--Katie Yee, Literary Hub "Intriguing . . . Plenty to admire."--Publishers Weekly Praise for Yan Lianke: Winner of the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature
Winner of the Franz Kafka Prize
Two-Time Finalist for the Man Booker International Prize "Yan's writing does for the Chinese heartland what John Steinbeck did for the American West, or Thomas Hardy for Southwest England."--Newman Prize for Chinese Literature Citation "Yan is one of those rare geniuses who finds in the peculiar absurdities of his own culture the absurdities that infect all cultures."--Washington Post "China's most controversial novelist . . . [A] preternatural gift for metaphor spills out of him unbidden."--New Yorker"Yan's subject is China, but he has condensed the human forces driving today's global upheavals into a bracing, universal vision."--New York Times Book Review "One of China's eminent and most controversial novelists and satirists."--Chicago Tribune "His talent cannot be ignored."--New York Times "China's foremost literary satirist . . . He deploys offbeat humor, anarchic set pieces and surreal imagery to shed new light on dark episodes from modern Chinese history."--Financial Times "[Yan is] criticizing the foundations of the Chinese state and the historical narrative on which it is built, while still somehow remaining one of its most lauded writers."--New Republic "There is nothing magical about Yan Lianke's realism . . . [with his] unflinching eye that nevertheless leaves you blinking with the whirling absurdities of the human condition."--Independent "One of China's most important--and certainly most fearless--living writers."--Kirkus Reviews "The work of the Chinese author Yan Lianke reminds us that free expression is always in contention--to write is to risk the hand of power."--Guardian