Location: China
Ken Ning
Ning Ken (1959 – ), born and raised in Beijing, began his writing career as a poet, first publishing in 1982. From 1984 to 1986 he taught at a village school outside of Lhasa, Tibet. Beginning in 1987, Ning Ken’s lyric essays about Tibet contributed to the revitalising of the contemporary nonfiction prose essay, a literary genre of great importance in China.
Ning Ken was a pioneer of online publication, and he posted his first novel, The City of Masks, serially on Sina.com. It was named the best internet novel of 2000; its 2001 printed version won a Lao She Literature Award in 2002 and was nominated for the 2009 Newman Prize for Chinese Literature. Ning Ken has since published the novels The Gate of Silence (2004), The Ringed Mountain (first published as The Ringed Woman in 2006), Tibetan Sky (2010) and Three Trios (2014), which was named as one of the best novels of its year by Asia Weekly. Tibetan Sky won several awards, including a Lao She Literature Award, and was nominated for the prestigious Mao Dun Literature Prize for best novel. Ning Ken’s short fiction has been collected in his books The Order of Things (2014) and Ukyi Lhamo (2015).
For many years, Ning Ken was the executive deputy editor of the literary magazine October. Ning Ken continues to live in Beijing, where he is affiliated with the Lao She Literary Institute and is an honorary member of the faculty of Beijing International Studies University. His works have been translated into Czech, English, French and Italian.