Event Details

Litfest is delighted that the 5th Lancaster International Fiction Lecture, a joint venture with the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (FHASS) at Lancaster University, will be given by British-Chinese writer Xiaolu Guo.

Writer and film-maker Xiaolu Guo wrote her first books in Mandarin, but when she moved to the UK to study film in 2002 she began writing in English. Her first English novel was A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, about which Ursula Le wrote: ‘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’ (Guardian). Since then Xiaolu’s books and films have attracted many awards and wide, admiring attention.

In her provocative, playful and entertaining lecture she 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?’

Xiaolu Guo was born in China. Her books include A Lovers Discourse and Once Upon a Time in the East, and My Battle of Hastings. Her many films include the documentary We Went to Wonderland and the feature film, UFO in Her Eyes, based on her novel of the same name. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a visiting professor at the Free University in Berlin. She lives in London.

Xiaolu Guo is a Chinese-born British writer. She has published a dozen books with Penguin Random House. Her novels include Village of Stone (2003, translated from the Chinese by Cindy Carter and shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award), A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007, shortlisted for the Women’s Prize), UFO in Her Eyes(2009) and I Am China (2014). Her memoir Once Upon a Time in the East won the National Book Critics Circle Award 2017 and was shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize. Her 2020 novel A Lover’s Discourse was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. Radical, her memoir of a year in New York, was published by Chatto (2023) and followed by My Battle of Hastings (2024). Her most recent novel is Call Me Ishmaelle (2025), a retelling of Melville’s Moby Dick.

Guo has also directed more than a dozen films, including How Is Your Fish Today? (Grand Prix of International Women Film Festival France) and UFO in Her Eyes (TIFF). Her feature She, a Chinese received the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Festival 2009. Her documentary We Went to Wonderland was in the Official Selection of ND/NF at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. Once Upon a Time Proletarian was selected for the Horizon Section at the Venice Film Festival 2009. She has had film retrospectives at Cinémathèque Suisse (2011), the Greek Film Archive (2018) and the Whitechapel Gallery (2019). Guo has been a visiting professor at Columbia University in New York and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She lives in London.