Tipped as a front runner for the Nobel Prize for Literature, Can Xue is one of a handful of Chinese avant-garde writers who have wowed international critics with their inventiveness.
Susan Sontag was said to consider Can Xue the one Chinese writer worthy of the Nobel Prize.
On Thursday, the Swedish Committee announced that the 2018 and 2019 prizes went to Peter Handke of Austria and the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk.
Ahead of the announcement, Can Xue said that it wasn't her time yet for the honor since her work had not yet reached mainstream readers, according to her publisher, Hunan Literature & Art Publishing House.
Can Xue, a pen name that means "residual snow," had been named by bookmakers as a favorite for the prizes, with odds, at one point, tied with those of the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami.
While Can Xue has earned accolades such as the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature, recognition of her work by the Swedish Committee would have been a significant acknowledgment of Chinese avant-garde fiction.
The genre has often been treated with a "sweeping historical approach" that overlooks its complexity and artistry, writes Zhansui Yu, a literary critic and author of *Chinese Avant-garde Fiction. *
Here are four things you need to know about Can Xue.
1. She doesn't edit her stories
Can Xue has said she "never edits" her stories.
"I just grab a pen and write, and every day I write a paragraph. For more than thirty years, it's always been like this," she said in an interview with Asymptote.
"All my stories " my novels, my novellas and my short stories " are written sequentially, from beginning to end. I never arrange them together or put them in a different sequence. My manuscripts are extremely clean " I very, very rarely correct even a single word."
2. You have to work for it
Can Xue's work has been described as challenging. The author herself is aware of it.
"I see writing as a performance," she told TimeOut Beijing in 2017.
"My writing is my performance, a performance of freedom. I think the best readers should take part in my performance, and have his or her own performance with Can Xue. The readers of my books must be very familiar with modern writing, with philosophy, with literature. Those are the readers I attract."
Chen Xiaozhen, an editor at Can Xue's publisher in Hunan, said he had read much of her work but could not claim to understand her, according to the Yangtse Evening Post.
The editor attributed this to Can Xue's "unlimited imagination, narration that reads like sleep-talking, in addition to fragmented and non-logical stories."
3. She is prolific
As a fiction writer and critic, Can Xue has published at least six novels and hundreds of short stories, novellas and commentaries on writers from Shakespeare to Borges.
Can Xue's output is considerable given that she has always handwritten her work and wrote for only an hour per day, according to Chen.
Many of her writings have been published in the English-language literary magazine Conjunctions, whose editor Bradford Morrow calls her "one of the most innovative and important contemporary writers in China, and in my opinion, in world literature."
4. Her education ended after elementary school
Can Xue was born in 1953, several years after the Communists defeated the Nationalists and declared the founding of the People's Republic of China.
Her schooling was cut short when the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, she recounts in her memoir, A Summer Day in the Beautiful South. Her father, a former editor of the New Hunan Daily, was locked up around that time. Can Xue had graduated from elementary school by then.
In her late teens and early 20s, she took odd jobs in factories and as a metal worker. After she married a carpenter, the couple became self-taught tailors.
Can Xue also taught herself English. She has been reading the original versions of English novels for the past two decades, thinking that their Chinese translations were inferior.
While a lifelong, voracious reader, she started writing only when she approached 30.
Her early work became Old Floating Cloud, one of her first published novellas that has since been translated into multiple languages.
Alice Yan contributed reporting.
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