Xiaolu Guo shortlisted for Rathbones Folio Prize 2018

29th March 2018

Xiaolu Guo’s memoir, Once Upon a Time in the East, has been shortlisted for the 2018 Rathbones Folio Prize.

A Wild Swans for a new generation, Once Upon a Time in the East takes Xiaolu from a run-down shack to film school in a rapidly changing Beijing, navigating the everyday peculiarity of modern China: censorship, underground art, Western boyfriends. In 2002 she leaves Beijing on a scholarship to study in Britain. Now, after a decade in Europe, her tale of East to West resonates with the insight that can only come from someone who is both an outsider and at home.

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Xiaolu Guo wins NBCC Award 2017

16th March 2018

Xiaolu Guo’s memoir Nine Continents (Once Upon a Time in the East in the UK) has won the Autobiography category of the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Awards.

The awards, begun in 1975 and considered among the most prestigious in American letters, are the sole prizes bestowed by a jury of working critics and book-review editors.

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Olivia Laing awarded Windham-Campbell Prize

9th March 2018

Olivia Laing is one of eight writers who have been recognised by the Windham-Campbell Prize. The judges said that she “searches the depths of the self” in her writing, and described her as “a cartographer of human emotion, mixing memoir, biography and critical engagement with an acute sense of place.”

Each recipient of the prize receives $165,000, which is intended to give them the freedom to write liberated from money worries.

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