Xiaolu Guo

Novelist and film-maker Xiaolu Guo charts her journey from a remote fishing village in Southern China to life on Europe’s literary scene in her powerful memoir Once Upon a Time in the East.

This is a history of modern China for a new generation, and a handbook of life lessons: how to be an artist when censorship kills creativity; how to be a woman in a country where girls are regularly drowned at birth. And, most poignantly, how to love when you’ve never been shown how.