The Oldest Magazine in China Gets a Makeover

Chinese literature has never had the kind of international appeal that literature from other Asian countries have garnered around the world. However, one of China's oldest literary magazines, People's Literature (人民文学), has brought out an English edition with a focus on the world's market. Associated with Paper Republic, the website devoted to Chinese literature in translation into English, the editors of Chinese People's Literature have brought out Pathlight.

Alice Xin Liu (English managing editor) and Eric Abrahamsen, the founder of Paper Republic, will talk about setting up the magazine, its challenges, and inspirations and where it will go from here. They'll be bringing two issues with very different aims, the first features the Mao Dun Literature Prize and the second is aimed at the London Book Fair, where China will be 2012 guest."

Eric Abrahamsen is a translator and publishing consultant who has been living in China since 2001. He is a co-founder and manager of Paper Republic, and the recipient of translation grants from PEN and the National Endowment for the Arts. His most recent translation is Wang Xiaofang’s Notes of a Civil Servant, to be published by Penguin in 2012.

Alice Xin Liu was born in Beijing but left for London at the age of seven, returning when she was 21. She is a graduate of English Literature, Durham University, UK but her Chinese cadre grandparents were the main force behind her real education. Now, still and enthusiastic reader of Chinese, Japanese and English fiction and poetry (especially the work of Haruki Murakami), she has translated poems by Sen Zi for the Copper Canyon Press/NEA Chinese poetry anthology Push Open the Window. She is now working on The Letters of Shen Congwen for a Chinese publishing house and is the English managing editor of Pathlight: New Chinese Writing.