Hua Gu

Ku Hua was born in a remote mountain village of Chia-ho County in southern Hunan. He wrote his first published short story in 1962 while working there on a farm. Treasuring the rich folklore of his area, he writes with a strong sense of local color of the peasants and minority hill people. At his mostra altro best, Ku can be compared to the great writer of a generation earlier, Shen Ts'ung-wen, and some have even compared him to Thomas Hardy. Like these two writers, he does not skirt the issue of sexuality, and for that reason he has occasionally been criticized in the puritanical People's Republic. However, unlike those writers, Ku sometimes gets mired in political jargon and cliches. Nevertheless, his novel A Town Called Hibiscus (1981) is a very moving account of the fortunes of a plucky young country heroine in the dark days of the Cultural Revolution. It won the Mao Tun Prize for Literature and has been highly successful in its movie adaptation as well. It has been translated into more than 10 languages, including English, French, Dutch, German, and Japanese. (Bowker Author Biography) mostra meno