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Shen Dacheng is a columnist, novelist, short story writer and editor. After graduating from Shanghai University in Industrial Management, she worked in marketing and then began a column (featuring short stories based on real characters’ lives) called ‘Strange People’ 《奇怪的人》 in the literary publication Sprout《萌芽》. Real name Xu Xiaoqian, she takes her pen name from a popular Shanghai pastry shop. Her first collection The Ones in Remembrance was published in 2017, and her newest collection Asteroids in the Afternoon was published in 2020.

Her 2018 short story ‘Little Miss Box Person’ is set in a world of virus-induced fear, where the rich live in sealed containers which protect them from the pathogen, and the rest live a life of constant, compulsory blood tests and hosings-down with disinfectant.

Of herself she says, "I was always an ordinary child, and now I'm an ordinary nine-to-fiver. I just write in the little time I have outside of work, and have the incredible fortune to publish what I write in newspapers and magazines, then collect those stories into books. I'm really no one special."

Photo credit: Yang Ming杨明