When she is born, her parents hand her over to a childless peasant couple in the mountains. Aged two, they leave her with grandparents in a fishing village on the East China Sea. She ends up in a Beijing film school and next, on a scholarship, in England. Censorship strikes but her life goes on a pace, as author and film maker, in the East and the West. Nature or nurture, what makes a writer?
Author of A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, Xiaolu Guo has now written Once Upon a Time in the East, an extraordinary memoir that tells a remarkable story full of reflections on how to be an artist when censorship kills creativity, how to be a woman when female babies are regularly drowned at birth and sexual abuse is commonplace, and the way to love when you’ve never been shown how.
Arts Centre, Devizes Road SN1 4BJ
Tel 01793 524481
6.30pm • 11 May • £8 (£7)
