Ma Jian China/United Kingdom

Bio
Ma Jian was born in Qingdao, China in 1953. He worked as a watch mender’s apprentice, a painter of propaganda boards, and a publicity photographer for a petrochemical plant. Later he was assigned the job of photojournalist for a state-run magazine. At thirty, he gave up this job and travelled for three years across China—a journey described in his book Red Dust, winner of the 2002 Thomas Cook Award. He is also the author of The Noodlemaker (2004), Stick Out Your Tongue (2006) and latest critically acclaimed novel, Beijing Coma (2008). After the government banned his books in China in 1987, he moved to Hong Kong, and then ten years later to London, where he now lives.


What book would you like to snuggle under covers with, and why?
"The book I return to again and again is Kafka's The Castle. I don't tend to "snuggle under the covers" to read. I prefer to read sitting on my sofa, or best of all at window seat on a long train journey."

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