Creative Women in China Today: Sheng Keyi

Born in Yiyang, Huan in the 1970s, Sheng Keyi is considered one of China's leading younger generation authors. Sheng's first full-length novel, Northern Girls — published in China in 2004 and forthcoming in an English translation in 2012 — drew on her own harrowing experience as a female job-seeking "migrant" to the southern economic boomtown of Shenzhen in the early 1990s. Sheng began to write full time in 2001 and has since won several prestigious national awards, including the Most Promising New Talent Award, the Guangdong New Talent Award, the New Works Award, and the Lu Xun Literature Prize.

Sheng's published work includes three full-length novels, Death Fugue, Northern Girls andHouse on Fire, and several novellas and short-story collections, A Getting Warm Campaign, At the Farewell Ceremony, Book of Keyi, and A World That Lacks Experience. Sheng, who has been hailed as one of China's boldest and socially-engaged novelists, also stands out, in the words of one critic, as "a ferocious experimenter with style and voice" whose work "covers a wide range of emotional and social territory."

Creative Women in Contemporary China is a series of conversations with some of China's most innovative and creative women. The next program features activist Wu Qing (12/12/12).