Miao Wei
苗炜
Miao Wei is Vice Editor-in-Chief of Sanlian Life Weekly, one of China's most influential cultural magazines, and something of a star journalist. Previously the author of Touring this Mortal Coil, a collection of his travel columns for Sanlian, he has now begun writing fiction.
2010's Unless the Soul Might Clap and Sing is Miao Wei's first venture into fiction, a collection of seven short stories all narrated in the first person, exploring the life of a man much like Miao Wei himself, who navigates the comfortable, cultured reaches of Beijing's society, among the young and the recently-young, those who are beginning to wonder what exactly this life is all about. With echoes of Catcher in the Rye, Miao Wei catches the spirit of a privileged class in search of itself. His most recent publications, The Emperor is Unwell, and There Will be Bread, are collections of linked novellas with a common theme: medicine in the first case, and food in the second.