Xiaolu Guo: ‘It would be tacky to ask: can you forgive me for writing this?’
Apr 08, 2023
4 minutes
Chinese-British author and film-maker Xiaolu Guo left China two decades ago to live in London. A writer of novels and memoirs, she has been shortlisted for the Women’s prize and won the US National Book Critics Circle award in 2017. Her work explores migration and alienation, as well as memory. Her provocative new title, Radical: A Life of My Own, takes the form of a diary-like dictionary, fusing autobiography with an exploration of language as she describes the personal crisis that ensued when she sought to claim creative freedom by leaving her family to take a teaching role on another continent, and became erotically entangled with a linguist she names “E”.
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