Lu Min interviewed Angus Phillips

Multi-award-winning Chinese novelist Lu Min talks about her newly translated novel Dinner for Six and about her life and writing career.

Min was born in 1973 in Jiangsu Province to a teacher mother and engineer father and has been writing since she was 25. She won the prestigious Lu Xun Literary prize in 2009 and has received many other significant literary honours. Her novels include Multiple Love Letters, The Steering Wheel, and This Love Could Not be Delivered. Her 2022 novel, Dinner for Six, has just been translated into English. It is a story of two single parents, their four teenaged children and their socially mismatched relationships, with themes of family life, growing up and lonely individuals coming together against the odds.

‘The reality of family life in China is rarely as we might imagine it. Relations and interactions are fraught with very familiar concerns – partners, children, neighbours – yet seen through Lu Min’s probing lens we see Chinese social relationships in all their ordinariness and also their peculiar uniqueness.’ Paul French, author of Midnight in Peking and City of Devils

Here Min talks to Professor Angus Phillips, director of the Oxford International Centre for Publishing at Oxford Brookes University.

The event is presented by the Confucius Institute and the Oxford International Centre for Publishing at Oxford Brookes University. Previous Confucius Institute events at the festival were Man Asian Literary Prize Winner Su Tong (2018), novelist, essayist and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo (2022) and Chinese-American fantasy writer Rebecca Kuang (2023).