Quest for nation's unsung literary gems

Like Sylvia Plath, whose recognizably-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, became a classic well after her suicide, Wang Xiaobo's deep essays on Chinese society and culture found a following only after his death in 1997.

Often a momentous piece of writing is "discovered" long after it is written. Instant recognition frequently eludes the singular and iconoclastic. It's either arrived too ahead of its time or doesn't fit the template preferred by the market, or is just plain "unlucky" to have not been noticed by critics, the media and the reading public.

We asked a few people engaged in the business of locating, translating and disseminating some of these possibly "neglected" gems of Chinese literature across the Anglophone world to pick their favorites. The chosen work would have to be written in 1949 or after and not widely known in a translated English version, to make the category of a "missed" contemporary classic.