Xinran
| Xuē Xīnrán 薛欣然 |
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Xinran at the 2016 Hay Festival
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| Born | 1958 Beijing |
| Occupation | journalist writer radio presenter speaker advocate |
| Education | First Military University of People's Liberation Army |
| Spouse | Toby Eady |
| Xue Xinran | |||||||||
| Traditional Chinese | 薛欣然 | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Simplified Chinese | 薛欣然 | ||||||||
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| Transcriptions | |
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| Standard Mandarin | |
| Hanyu Pinyin | Xuē Xīnrán |
| Wade–Giles | Hsueh Hsin-Jan |
Xuē Xīnrán (薛欣然, pen name Xinran, born in Beijing in 1958) is a British-Chinese journalist, author, speaker, and advocate for women's issues. She was a popular radio personality in China with a call-in program named "Words on the Night Breeze" from 1989 to 1997. The program focused on women's issues and life stories. She was well known for travelling extensively in China to interview women for her work. In 1997, she moved to London and began writing stories of the women she met along her journeys. Her first book, The Good Women of China, was published in 2002, becoming an international bestseller. She frequently contributes to The Guardian and the BBC.
First Military University of People's Liberation Army, 1983-1987; English and International Relations
Xinran was born into a wealthy and privileged family on 19 July 1958. She was raised by her grandparents due to her parents' imprisonment during China's cultural revolution. She has said that her first memory was of the Red Guards setting her home on fire when she was 6 years old.
Xinran was married, while working as an army administrator, and has one son, Panpan, who was born in 1988. She later divorced. She moved to London in 1997 and married British literary agent Toby Eady in 2002.
In London, she began work on her seminal book about Chinese women's lives The Good Women of China, a memoir relating many of the stories she heard while hosting her radio show ("Words on the Night Breeze") in China. The book is a candid revelation of many Chinese women's thoughts and experiences that took place both during and after the Cultural Revolution when Chairman Mao and Communism ruled the land. The book was published in 2002 and has been translated into over thirty languages.
Sky Burial, her second book, was published in 2004. This is the story of Shu Wen, whose husband, only a few months after their marriage in the 1950s, joined the Chinese army and was sent to Tibet for the purpose of unification of the two cultures.
A collection of Xinran’s Guardian columns from 2003 to 2005, What the Chinese Don't Eat, was published in 2006. It covers a vast range of topics from food to sex education, and from the experiences of British mothers who have adopted Chinese daughters, to whether Chinese people do Christmas shopping or have swimming pools.
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