Li Rui

Who is Li Rui?

Li Rui is a short-story writer and novelist from China. He is best known for his Houtu series of short stories, which won the China Times Literary Prize as well as the 8th National Award for best short stories.

He has published five novels, several novellas and several volumes of short stories. In 2004, Li won the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres award for his contributions to arts and literature.

Laifong Leung in the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Chinese Culture has the following to say about Li Rui:

"A writer of the Root-seeking school, Li Rui began publishing fiction in 1974 when he was a 'sent-down youth' in the area of the Luliang mountains in Shanxi province. He did not make his name, however, until the publication of Deep Earth, a collection of eighteen short stories. In a concise style, Li blends his sympathy with a careful depiction of the helplessness and stagnation of peasant life against an austere landscape. Li's first novel, Silver City, is a gripping family saga based on his father's experience as an underground Communist, and the latter's tragic death in a cadre school. Li's preoccupation with peasant life continued in his second and third novels, No-Wind Tree and No Clouds for Ten Thousand Miles. In both novels, Li uses peasants as first-person narrators, letting them speak their minds and feelings, creating a polyphonic effect. The skillful use of dialect further adds an authentic flavour. Because Li sets his rural stories in the area of the Luliang mountains, some critics associate him with the Potato School, which began in the mid-1940s and flourished in the 1950s with writers such as Zhao Shulo and Ma Feng. Actually, Li's peasant tales are more concerned with the gloomy aspects of rural China than with the optimistic depiction of socialist construction characteristic of this school".