Ma Jian was born in Qingdao, China, in 1953. He worked as a watch mender’s apprentice and a painter of propaganda boards before taking a job as a photojournalist for a state-run magazine. At the age of thirty, he left his job and traveled for three years across China, a journey later described in his book Red Dust. In 1987 he completed Stick Out Your Tongue, which prompted the Chinese government to ban his future work. That same year, Ma Jian left Beijing for Hong Kong as a dissident, but he continued to return to China, and in 1989 he supported the pro-democracy activists in Tiananmen Square. After the handover of Hong Kong he moved to Germany and then London, where he now lives.

Books by Ma Jian

Beijing Coma

Ma Jian, translated by Flora Drew

In this cross-generational, allegorical novel of the struggle between oppression and liberation played out in the streets of a tumultuous China, critically acclaimed author Ma Jian guides us through the furthest extremes of human suffering, hope, and imagination.