Chen Yingzhen

Chen Yingzhen
Chen Yingzhen and his wife in Taipei, March 2003
Native name	陳映真
Born	(1937-11-08) 8 November 1937 (age 79) Shinchiku Prefecture, Japanese Taiwan
Died	22 November 2016(2016-11-22) (aged 79) Beijing, China
Occupation	author
Language	Chinese, English, Japanese
Nationality	Taiwanese
Alma mater	Cheng Kung Senior High School Tamkang University
Period	1959-2006
Genre	prose, novel
Subject	left-wing politics, humanitarianism, Marxism, modernism
Literary movement	Taiwan Nativist Literature
Spouse	陳麗娜 (m. 1977; his death 2016)

Chen Yingzhen (陳映真; 8 November 1937 – 22 November 2016) was a Taiwanese author. Since the 1980s, he has been viewed by many as "Taiwan's greatest author", according to Jeffrey C. Kinkley. Chen is also notable for having served a prison sentence for "subversive activity" between 1968 and 1973. He was active as writer from the late-1950s until his death in 2016.

Chen was again imprisoned in 1979.

The Collected Works of Chen Yingzhen is 15 volumes long, and was published in 1988. Some of his stories were also included in Lucien Miller's Exiles at Home.

Chen Yingzhen was born in northern Taiwan, the son of a devout Christian minister. Despite this, he never was a Christian himself while growing up. He was arrested in 1968 by the Kuomintang for "leading procommunist activities", and was imprisoned until 1973. Chen died in Beijing on 22 November 2016 at the age of 79 following a long illness.

Some critics have seen Chen's work as featuring important moral dimensions while lacking technical proficiency. For example, Joseph S. M. Lau said of Chen, "his output is relatively small and his style is at times embarrassing, yet he is a very important writer... Almost alone among his contemporaries, he addresses himself to some of the most sensitive problems of his time".

Chen was a supporter of the notion of a unifying Chinese national identity in Taiwan, as opposed to "nativist" writers like Zhang Liangze, who support the development of a native Taiwanese consciousness.