Yan Ge Part 1 on Happiness, Elsewhere, and Striving

”If I enter a project knowing what I’m going to do, confidently, I wouldn’t do it.”

It’s Women in Translation Month!

Yan Ge is here to discuss her life and writing. She was born in Chengdu, Sichuan Province People’s Republic of China. Emerging as a prodigious writer in Chinese and Sichuanese, she was named as one of China’s twenty future literary masters by People Magazine. In 2012, she was chosen as Best New Writer by the Prestigious Chinese Literature Media Prize. For English language readers, Nicky Harman first translated her novella, White Horse, for Hope Road publishing in 2014, a story about young girls negotiating adolescence in the presence of a mysterious white horse. Then, four years later, Nicky translated The Chilli Bean Paste Clan in 2018, published by Balestier. Elsewhere arrived in 2023 (Faber), and Yan Ge treated us to a new dimension of her work entirely: short fiction and, for the first time, written in English.

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Reference Points

George Saunders

Rippling Points 

Chapters
02.30 - connected by Leeds
4.20 - Drifting from the Chinese language
5.45 - Writing elsewhere in English
09.20 - Transforming the process
10:50 - A new relationship with language 
14:05 - Linguistic and cultural experiences of the characters
16:47- Happiness
19:24 - Contentment and striving 
21:00 - Rippling Pages Bookshop
23:41 - Making writing hard and easy
28:26 - Having belief