London-based Chinese novelist Xiaolu Guo up for top award

The 2005 Pearl Award winner for Creative Excellence Xiaolu Guo has been nominated for a £30,000 Orange Prize.

Xiaoluguo

The 33-year-old, who wrote her first English novel in in 2002, is nominated for her romantic comedy, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers.
Xiaolu’s book is deliberately written in bad English and tells the story of a Chinese woman sent to London by her parents to study. Her heroine quickly renames herself Z after arriving at Heathrow, because no one can pronounce her name. She soon discovers, however, that she is no better at English.
Z winds up lodging with a Chinese family in Tottenham, North London but, when she meets a man, she enters a new world of sex, freedom and self-discovery. And although her English improves, she still struggles to understand him.
Other nominees for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction are Rachel Cusk, US Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Tyler, Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Indian writer Kiran Desai.
The winner of the award, which is in its 12th year and honours women writers, will be announced at a ceremony on June 6. Good luck Xiaolu!