20 Facts About Xiaolu Guo

Xiaolu Guo's writing and films explore migration, alienation, memory, personal journeys, feminism, translation and transnational identities.

Xiaolu Guo was an inaugural fellow of the Columbia Institute of Ideas and Imagination in Paris, 2018, and a jury member for the Man Booker Prize 2019.

Xiaolu Guo grew up with her illiterate grandparents in a village of fishermen in Shitang, then with her parents and brother in the city of Wenling, both in the Chinese coastal province of Zhejiang.

Xiaolu Guo's father was a traditional landscape ink painter and her mother was a Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution.

Xiaolu Guo published her first poetry collection in her teens while studying ink painting.

Xiaolu Guo has served on the judging panel for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and in 2016 she served as a jury for the Financial Times Emerging Voices Awards for Fiction.

Xiaolu Guo has lectured on creative writing and film-making at King's College, London, the University of Westminster, Zurich University, Bern University, Swarthmore College, and Harvard University.

Xiaolu Guo is an honorary professor at the University of Nottingham and a guest professor at the University of Bern in Switzerland.

Xiaolu Guo was a guest of the DAAD Artists in Residence in Berlin in 2012 and a Writer in Residence of the Literaturhaus Zurich and the PWG Foundation in Zurich in 2015.

Xiaolu Guo soon renames herself "Z" and her encounters with an unnamed Englishman spur both of them to explore their own sense of identity.

Xiaolu Guo's 2009 novel UFO in Xiaolu Guo's Eyes, set in a semi-real Chinese village, is an experimental meta-fiction in the form of a series of police interviews about an alleged UFO sighting.

Xiaolu Guo's 2010 book, Lovers in the Age of Indifference, is a collection of short stories that depicts the lives of people adrift between the West and the East, set in various locations.

Xiaolu Guo's 2008 film, We Went to Wonderland is a black-and-white essay film focusing on two elderly Chinese communists who arrive in the rundown East End of London and comment on the Western world from their astonished Chinese perspective.

Xiaolu Guo's other 2009 film, Once Upon a Time Proletarian, is a sister-film to She, a Chinese.

Xiaolu Guo's 2011 fiction feature, UFO in Her Eyes is a cinematic adaptation of her novel of the same title.

Xiaolu Guo was the 2005 Pearl Award winner for Creative Excellence.

Xiaolu Guo writes in both English and Chinese, and has served as a jury member for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and International Dublin Literary Award.

Xiaolu Guo was awarded the Gilda Film Prize for her film career at the 37th Florence International Cinema and Women Festival in Italy, in 2015.

Xiaolu Guo has had film retrospectives at the Cinema du Reel in the Pompidou Center in 2010, the Swiss Film Archive in 2011, the Greek Film Archive in Athens in 2018 and London's Whitechapel Gallery in 2019.

In 2022 Xiaolu Guo was commissioned by the Swiss Television RSI and Locarno Film Festival, directed a short documentary Rocks Remember.