Radical: Xiaolu Guo in conversation

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This event took place on 13 April 2023

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Radical: Xiaolu Guo in conversation

Watch event again now

This event took place on 13 April 2023

The prize-winning author of A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary For Lovers launches her new memoir.

Join us for the launch of Xiaolu Guo's new memoir Radical, a playful, provocative and original take on striving for a life of her own.

Xiaolu brings her experience of living in different continents into all her books: from rural and urban China, to London, Europe, and now New York, where she spent a year, away from her husband and child, separated by place and language, and from people.

Radical is a memoir about being an outsider and the desperate longing to connect. It is also a dictionary and an ardent love letter; an archive of an artist's search for creative freedom and an attempt to find a space between her fascination with Western culture and her nostalgia for Eastern landscapes.

This event ties into our current exhibition Chinese and British, which you can visit at libraries across the UK. Find a list of participating locations here.

Speakers

Xiaolu Guo

Author

Xiaolu Guo was born in China. She published six books before moving to Britain in 2002, where in 2013 she was named as one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists. Her books include: Village of Stone, shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize; A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, shortlisted for the Orange Prize; and I Am China. Her memoir Once Upon a Time in the East won the National Book Critics Circle Award, was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award and the Rathbones Folio Prize 2018. It was a Sunday Times Book of the Year. Her most recent novel A Lover's Discourse was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize 2020.

Xiaolu has directed several award-winning films including She, A Chinese, and documentaries about China and Britain. She was a judge for the Booker Prize in 2019, and is currently a visiting professor at Columbia University in New York.

Headshot of Xiaolu Guo