Life and times of a magical realist
By Mei Jia | China Daily | Updated: 2018-04-23 07:33
Chinese writer Liu Zhenyun has been honored with France's Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters for his contribution to world literature. Mei Jia reports.
Upon receiving the award of Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters on April 13 at the Institut Francais in Beijing, Liu Zhenyun says what he did was just sit beside "small potatoes", the unimportant people he listened to in times of need, and wrote about them because nobody else would listen to their stories.
He always uses the metaphor that it is not him who writes and creates his characters. He just listens to them as they talked to him in their own words.
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