Ah Lai
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author, Editor.
(1959- ) Poet, editor and author, who served from 1999 to 2006 as an editor of Kehuan Shijie ["SF World"], the best-selling genre magazine in the People's Republic of China. Born in the Ngawa and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture, Ah Lai is that rarest of Chinese authors: a member of China's Tibetan ethnic minority, a condition which shapes much of his work, including the much-garlanded Kong Shan ["Empty Mountain"] (2005-2009 3vols), which employed a slight veil of Magic Realism to an evocation of life in Tibetan communities. He specifically left the magazine to concentrate on Gesa'er Wang ["King Gesar"] (2009) a work of Equipoise that replays the legends of a demon-quelling figure from Tibetan and Chinese Mythology, against the backdrop of a Tibetan village in the 1920s, during the formation of the People's Republic. [JonC]
Ah Lai
born Barkam, Sichuan, China: 1959
works (selected)
- Chen'ai Luoding ["Dust Settles"] (Beijing: Renmin Wenxue Chubanshe, 1998) [binding unknown/]
- Red Poppies (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002) [trans of the above by Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-Chin Lin: hb/]
- Yueliang Xia de Yinjiang ["The Silversmith Beneath the Moonlight"] (Wuchang: Changjiang Wenyi Chubanshe, 2001) [coll: binding unknown/]
- Kong Shan ["Empty Mountain"] (Beijing: Renmin Wenxue Chubanshe, 2005, 2007, 2009) [in three volumes: binding unknown/]
- Dadi de Jieti ["Ladder of the Earth"] (Shanghai: Nanhai Chuban, 2008) [coll: binding unknown/]
- Gesa'er Wang ["King Gesar"] (Chongqing: Chongqing Chubanshe, 2009) [binding unknown/]
links
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