Xiaolu Guo

Xiaolu Guo was born on Nov 20, 1973 in China. Xiaolu Guo's big-screen debut came with How Is Your Fish Today? directed by Xiaolu Guo in 2006.

Born toward the end of the Cultural Revolution in China, talented writer and director Xiaolu Guo relocated to the United Kingdom at age 29, with a scholarship for a film course there, and decided to write in English to reach a wider readership, due to limited options for people reading her either in the original or in translation. She had been raised by her grandparents in a poor fishing village and didn't meet her parents until almost seven, when they took her away to a worker compound in Wenling. She then worked hard to land a spot as a film student in Beijing, where she subsequently moved once again.During this time she also published poems inspired by the American writer Frank O'Hara and short stories, and wrote for a soap opera program . Her novels are influenced by the French nouveau roman and other 60s experimental fiction, with its distance, fragmentation and spareness, allowing more room for the reader's own imagination.