The highly acclaimed British-Chinese writer and film-maker Xiaolu Guo will give the fifth Lancaster International Fiction Lecture later this month.

Xiaolu will give her lecture on Tuesday, October 21 in The Marcus Merriman Lecture Theatre at Lancaster University at 7pm.

The Lancaster International Fiction Lecture is a joint venture between Lancaster literature festival Litfest and the University’s Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.

After the lecture, this year given in person for the first time, Xiaolu will be in conversation with Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at Lancaster University Dr Derek Hird.

Xiaolu wrote her first books in Mandarin, but when she moved to the UK to study film in 2002 she began writing in English.

Of her first novel, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in the Guardian: “It succeeds in luring the western reader into an alien way of thinking: a trick only novels can pull off, and indeed one of their finest tricks.”

Since then, her books and films have won many awards and wide, admiring attention.

In her provocative and playful lecture, ‘Fiction as an Exercise in Sabotage’, Xiaolu asks the question: “How can someone who spent 30 years writing in pictograms and ideograms and who inherited eastern philosophies, enter an alphabetic language and take on Western narratives?”

On Monday, October 20, Xiaolu will join the Litfest International Fiction Online Book Club for a discussion of her latest novel, Call Me Ishmaelle, in which she takes on the challenge of reimagining Moby Dick, Herman Melville’s 19th-century whaling classic, for the 21^st century.

The Litfest International Fiction Book Club is convened by Dr Sam O’Donoghue, Lecturer in Spanish at Lancaster University and Bill Swainson of Litfest.

Tickets for the Lancaster International Fiction Lecture are free but registration is essential through the Dukes, Lancaster.

Tickets for the Litfest International Fiction Book Club are £4 and available from Crowdcast:

XIAOLU GUO is the author of A Lovers Discourse and Once Upon a Time in the East. Her films include the documentary We Went to Wonderland and the feature film, UFO in Her Eyes. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a visiting professor at the Free University in Berlin.