Yan Ge (Chinese: 颜歌, pinyin: Yán Gē, born 1984) is the pen name of Chinese writer Dai Yuexing (戴月行, pinyin: Dài Yuèxíng).
Life and career
Yan Ge was born Dai Yuexing in December 1984 in the Pixian district of Chengdu.[1] She began writing at the age of ten and her first book was published when she was 17 years old.[2]
Yan completed a PhD in comparative literature at Sichuan University and is the Chair of the China Young Writers Association. Her writing includes substantial amounts of her native Sichuanese, rather than Standard Chinese.[3]People’s Literature (Renmin Wenxue人民文学) magazine recently chose her – in a list reminiscent of The New Yorker's ‘20 under 40’ – as one of China's twenty future literary masters. In 2012 she was chosen as Best New Writer by the prestigious Chinese Literature Media Prize (华语文学传媒大奖 最佳新人奖). In 2011, she was awarded a visiting scholar position at Duke University.[4] Yan was a guest writer at the Crossing Border Festival in The Hague in November 2012, and has since appeared at numerous literary festivals throughout Europe.[5] She has lived in Dublin with her husband, Daniel, and their child since 2015.[6][7]
Yan has been writing in English in addition to Mandarin and Sichuanese. Her first English book is a 2023 short story collection Elsewhere: stories.[2][8] Reviewer Chelsea Leu wrote
Yan Ge’s English debut is preoccupied with language, its failures, and its relationship to human emotions and the raw reality – the 'food' – of life. ... These stories map out the distance between the head and the gut – the way language can fail to convey the deepest, most visceral facts of life."[8]
Reviewer Sindya Bhanoo wrote that the stories "explore the power of language across the Chinese diaspora to either bring people together or push them apart."[9]
