China – Dong Lai
Dong Lai, original name Hua Mengyu, was born in the 1990s. She grew up in a small city in the middle of China and now lives in Shanghai. She was selected as the writer of the year in Selected Journals of Chinese Literature. In 2019, she published her debut short story collection Deep River, which won the first prize in the Douban Reading Essay Contest that year. She published the second collection of short stories The Year of Miracles in 2021, and won the first prize of the second Page One Literary Award. Self-proclaimed “wild”, eclectic writing theme, free form, legendary stories, scattered old stories, unowned dreams, sudden alienation and dramatization, all with a kind of writing without boundaries, walking through the dense forest of content and subject. Adhering to the novel will of “fighting against no longer existence and going against an accelerating world”, she pays attention to the current life and mental state of urban young people, and also tries to find solid meaning in the chaotic and noisy reality.