Life and Leisure

Success comes from varied backgrounds

By Mei Jia (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-08-13 13:26

Born in the 1970s, Sheng Keyi and Cui Manli (pictured) started publishing works at the onset of the new century. Though their eye-catching looks have attracted much attention, it is their strong personalities that have really impressed serious critics.

Sheng describes herself as a writer without any professional training, whose strikingly direct works have been applauded by mainstream critics.

She says her unchanged focus is on women struggling at the lower end of the social strata, such as those battling for respect in her maiden work The Northern Girls. Bai Ye, a literary critic who has followed the work of women writers over the years, hails Sheng's novel Ode to Morality (2007) as one of the best pieces so far dealing with extramarital affairs.

Cui, however, was well trained as a literature major in Nanjing University. The cofounder of a small IT company says she was thinking about a novel on the good old life of ancient Nanjing in the memory of her grandparents' generation. Inspiration struck her and brought out the successful Ups and Downs series (2008), which Bai Ye hails as "workplace novels with real literary taste".

Her efforts on recollecting the memory of Nanjing fruited in The Era of Glass (2009). The strong and capable male protagonists have led some readers to assume that the author was a man.