Zhang Ailing

Writer & Novelist

(1920 – 1995) · East Asia

Chinese writer and novelist of the mid-twentieth century, considered one of the greatest writers in modern Chinese literature. Born in Shanghai in 1920 to a once-wealthy family in decline, her fiction captured the texture of urban Chinese life under colonial and wartime conditions with psychological precision. Her novella Love in a Fallen City and the novel The Rice-Sprout Song are among her most celebrated works.