Zhang Yawen Author

Zhang Yawen was born in a poor, remote mountain region of Northeast China in 1944. Her writing career began in 1979 with a 3,000-word story that was published in a newspaper. Since then, she has travelled around 10 countries and written more than eight million words, including her autobiography Cry For Life. Her dramatisation of the life of Qian Xiuling, a Chinese woman who saved more than a hundred citizens of Belgium with the help of the country’s German military governor, was adapted for television and won the China Writers Association’s ‘Ordos’ Prize for Literary Excellence.