author
Zi Ye
1910–1939
A left-wing Chinese writer from Hunan, he packed a great deal into a life cut short at just 28. His fiction is remembered for its sharp attention to rural life and the struggles of ordinary people in early 20th-century China.
1 Audiobook
豐收
by Zi Ye
About the author
Born in Yiyang, Hunan, Zi Ye was the pen name of Yu Zhaoming, also known as Yu Helin. He became part of China's modern literary world in the 1930s and was associated with left-wing writing, using fiction and drama to depict the realities facing common people.
He helped found the magazine Wuming Wenyi in 1932 and joined the League of Left-Wing Writers the same year. His best-known work is the short story collection Harvest, published in 1935, which helped establish his reputation as a writer of rural life.
Zi Ye died in 1939, still very young, but his work continued to be read and collected afterward. Even with a brief career, he remains a notable voice in modern Chinese literature for the way he brought social concern and human feeling together on the page.