Sheng Keyi (Guangzhou/China) and Guo Xiaolu (London/UK)

Host: Frank Meinshausen (sinologist, Munich)

In 2002, Sheng Keyi published three novels in quick succession, which greatly delighted critics, and a volume of short stories. Sheng Keyi was born in Yiyang (province of Hunan) in 1974 and stayed Shenzhen in the north east of China until she moved to Beijing in 2002. Qian Xiaohong, the heroine of her novel "Eine Schwester aus dem Norden" (‘a sister from the north’), finds a job as a chamber maid in Shenzhen Special Economic Zone. However, when Qian Xiaohong returns to the village where she was born, she makes a painful discovery: everyone there, including her family, believes that she earns her money as a prostitute. Their view is nourished and distorted by prejudices and ignorance about the harsh living conditions of ordinary workers in Shenzhen.

Guo Xiaolu was born in 1973. After spending her youth in a small town on the China Sea, she went to Beijing at the age of eighteen, where she studied at the Film Academy and wrote five novels. In 2002, she moved to London. Her novel "Village of Stone" was published first in Shanghai (2002) and then in London. In 2005 it was published in Germany. The protagonist of her novel, Coral, who lives in Beijing, is sent a conger eel from her distant home town. Now, whenever she begins a meal, she delves ever deeper into her past, into memories of her home town from which she had tried to escape, because life their seemed so hard and as cold as stone.