Penmanship rooted in blood and gore
Yu Hua shot to international fame in 1994, when Zhang Yimou's To Live, based on Yu's novel, won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes. The story of Fugui - a decadent landlord who goes from being a pauper to an inadvertent recruit in the battle between the Kuomintang and the People's Liberation Army, and survives famine, deprivation and the excesses of the "cultural revolution" (1966-76), losing almost everything except his will to live - was representative of a generation.
The slew of international awards, including Italy's Premio Grinzane Cavour, 1998, that came its way was a recognition of the extraordinary resilience of a people as much as it was of Yu's powerful penmanship.
He learnt to look at blood, injury and physical mutilation with a clinical detachment quite early on. The son of doctor parents, Yu grew up inside a hospital. For five years he was a dentist until he joined the State-run culture wing as a staff writer.
