Shi Kang

b. 1968, Beijing

Writer, screenwriter

Shi Kang is a popular contemporary Beijing-based novelist who embodies a new breed of post-Wang Shuo rebelliousness and iconoclasm. Shi Kang burst onto the Chinese literary scene in 1999 with a fresh, highly readable narrative style that seemed to carry on the literary mantle of popular writers Wang Shuo and Wang Xiaobo, after the former gave up writing and the latter passed away. He is best known for his popular Youth trilogy, which consists of the novels Smashed and Broken (Zhili pocui), Wobbling Along (Huanghuang youyou) and Completely Muddled (Yichang hutu), which were published between 1999 and 2001.

Filled with local colour from the author’s home of Beijing, the three novels established Shi Kang’s unique first-person narrative voice and his signature novelistic structure of dividing books into hundreds of short chapters which always begin with the number zero. In 2002 Shi Kang published Passion and Blindness (Jiqing yü mimang), a contemporary urban love story, which is also the author’s first novel written in the third person.

Also a prolific screenwriter, Shi Kang was a co-writer of Feng Xiaogang’s 2002 Spring Festival comedy smash, Big Shot’s Funeral (Da wan), which starred PRC comic hero Ge You opposite Donald Sutherland (see New Year’s movies). Shi also adapted the screenplay from his own Passion and Blindness for a forthcoming film by Taiwan director Lee Gang (Ang Lee’s brother). Shi Kang is among the first PRC writers to promote himself through the Internet, where he ran Shikang.com, a website where his entire body of literary work was made available for downloading at no cost.

MICHAEL BERRY