Xiaolu Guo (; born 20 November 1973) is a Chinese-born British author, filmmaker and academic. Her writing and films explore migration, alienation, memory, personal journeys, feminism, translation and transnational identities.
Guo has directed a dozen films, including documentaries and fiction. Her best-known films include She, a Chinese and We Went to Wonderland. Her novels have been translated into 28 languages. Nine Continents: A Memoir in and out of China won the National Book Critics Circle Award 2017. In 2013, she was named as one of Granta magazine's Best of Young British Novelists, a list drawn up once a decade. She was an inaugural fellow of the Columbia Institute of Ideas and Imagination in Paris, France, in 2018, and a jury member for the Man Booker Prize 2019.
Early life Xiaolu Guo grew up with her illiterate grandparents in a village of fishermen in Shitang, then with her parents and brother in the city of Wenling, both in the Chinese coastal province of Zhejiang. Her father was a traditional landscape ink painter and her mother was a Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution. Guo published her first poetry collection in her teens while studying ink painting. In 1993, she left her province to study at the Beijing Film Academy (in the same class as Jia Zhangke). In 2002, Guo moved to London to study Documentary Directing at the National Film and Television School.Xiaolu Guo, Once Upon A Time in the East: A Story of Growing up, Chatton & Windus, 2007, page 178 (). She has lived in Paris, Zurich and Berlin.
Career Xiaolu Guo has served on the judging panel for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and in 2016 she served as a jury for the Financial Times Emerging Voices Awards for Fiction. She has lectured on creative writing and film-making at King's College, London, the University of Westminster, Zurich University, Bern University, Swarthmore College, and Harvard University. She is an honorary professor at the University of Nottingham and a guest professor at the University of Bern in Switzerland. Guo was a guest of the DAAD Artists-in-Residence programme in Berlin in 2012 and a Writer-in-Residence of the Literaturhaus Zurich and the PWG Foundation in Zurich in 2015. In 2020–2021, she was Writer-in-Residence of East Asian Department, Columbia University.
Books Guo's 2005 autobiographical novel, Village of Stone, focuses on two people, Coral and Red, who live together in Beijing, and how Coral's life changes one day when she receives a dried eel in the post, an anonymous gift from someone in her remote home village. Doris Lessing spoke highly of the book in 2004: "Reading it rather like finding yourself in a dream." The Times Literary Supplement praised the novel: "The language has the pared-down simplicity of a fable; the effect is a bit like that of a Haruki Murakami novel."
Guo's 2008 novel, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, is the first one that she wrote in English after publishing several Chinese books.Xiaolu Guo, Once Upon A Time in the East: A Story of Growing up, Chatto & Windus, 2017, chapter "To be published and to be known", pp. 263–266 (). It tells the journey of a young Chinese woman in London. She soon renames herself "Z" and her encounters with an unnamed Englishman spur both of them to explore their own sense of identity. The novel is written in the heroine's broken English to begin with, in a dictionary form. With each chapter, her English gradually improves, reflecting the improvement of the heroine's own English over the year in which the novel is set. American writer Ursula Le Guin reviewed the book in The Guardian, stating: "We're in the hands of someone who knows how to tell a story [...] It succeeds in luring the western reader into an alien way of thinking: a trick only novels can pull off, and indeed one of their finest tricks."
Guo's 2009 novel UFO in Her Eyes, set in a semi-real Chinese village, is an experimental meta-fiction in the form of a series of police interviews about an alleged UFO sighting. The novel was adapted into a feature film, produced by Turkish German filmmaker Fatih Akin and directed by Xiaolu Guo herself. It received the Best Script Prize at the Hamburg International Film Festival.
Guo's 2010 novel, 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth, is a coming-of-age story about a 21-year-old Chinese woman called Fenfang, from her life as a film extra in Beijing, to where she has travelled far to seek her fortune, only to encounter a Communist regime that has outworn its welcome, a city in varying degrees of development, and sexism more in keeping with her peasant upbringing than the country's supposedly progressive capital.
Guo's 2010 book, Lovers in the Age of Indifference, is a collection of short stories that depicts the lives of people adrift between the West and the East, set in various locations.
In 2015, Xiaolu Guo published the novel I Am China, which she describes as "a parallel story about two Chinese lovers in exile – the external and internal exile that I had felt since leaving China".Xiaolu Guo, Once Upon A Time in the East: A Story of Growing up, Chatto & Windus, 2017, p. 269 (). In the book, the London-based literary translator Iona Kirkpatrick discovers a story of romance and revolution as she translates a collection of letters and diaries by a Chinese punk musician named Kublai Jian. Unbeknownst to Iona, Jian has come to Britain seeking political asylum, while another character, Mu, is in Beijing trying to track him down. As the translator tracks the lovers' 20-year relationship, she develops a sense of purpose in deciding to bring Jian and Mu together again before it is too late. The novel was one of NPR's Best Books of 2014."NPR's Book Concierge: Our Guide To 2014's Great Reads", National Public Radio, 3 December 2014. Retrieved 9 August 2017.
In 2017, she published her memoir Once Upon a Time in the East (the US edition entitled Nine Continents: A Memoir in and out of China) which received the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. The memoir is a chronicle of Guo's growing up in China in the 1970s and '80s and her journey to the West.
In 2020, her novel A Lover's Discourse was released by Grove Atlantic in the US and Penguin Random House (Chatto) in the UK, and was shortlisted for the 2020 Goldsmiths Prize.
In 2021, her nonfiction Radical: A Life of My Own was released by Grove Atlantic in the US and Penguin Random House (Chatto) in the UK."Radical: A Life of My Own", London: Chatto & Windus, 2023. It was followed by My Battle of Hastings in August 2024.My Battle of Hastings: Chronicle of a Year by the Sea, London: Chatto & Windus, 2024.
In 2025, her novel Call Me Ishmaelle, a retelling of Herman Melville's Moby Dick, was released by Chatto & Windus in the UK, and Grove Atlantic in the US in 2026. It was the New York Times Editor's Pick in January 2026.
Films Guo's 2004 film is The Concrete Revolution, a film essay about the construction workers in Beijing building stadiums for the 2008 Olympics. It received the Grand Prix at the International Human Rights Film Festival in Paris, 2005, and Special Mention at the Chicago Documentary Film Festival.
Guo's 2006 film, How Is Your Fish Today?, inspired by Alain Robbe-Grillet's Trans-Europ-Express (1966), is a docu-drama set in modern China, focusing on the intertwined stories of two main characters: a frustrated writer (Rao Hui) and the subject of his latest film script, Lin Hao (Zijiang Yang). It was selected for the Official Competition at Sundance Film Festival 2007 and Rotterdam Film Festival, and received the Grand Prix at International Women's Film Festival in France.
Guo's 2008 film, We Went to Wonderland, is a black-and-white essay film focusing on two elderly Chinese communists who arrive in the rundown East End of London and comment on the Western world from their astonished Chinese perspective. The film premiered at the Rotterdam IFFR and was immediately picked for the 2008 New Directors/New Films Festival of the MoMA / Lincoln Film Society in New York.
Guo's 2009 feature, She, a Chinese, is a homage to Jean-Luc Godard's La Chinoise. This film won the Golden Leopard at the 2009 Locarno International Film Festival and the Best Script Award at the Hamburg Film Festival 2010. It has been distributed in the UK, France, Spain, Germany and Switzerland.
Guo's other 2009 film, Once Upon a Time Proletarian, is a sister-film to She, a Chinese. This documentary looks at China in the post-Marxist era and examines different social classes in the society. It premieres at the Venice Film Festival 2009 and has been shown at Rotterdam IFFR and Sheffield DocFest.
Guo's 2011 fiction feature, , is a cinematic adaptation of her novel of the same title. The film stars Chinese actress Shi Ke and German cult figure Udo Kier and is a political metaphor recounted through the transformation that befalls a small Chinese village after an alleged UFO sighting. Inspired by Soviet cinema, Xiaolu Guo dedicated this film to Soy Cuba, a banned 1964 Soviet-Cuban film directed by Mikhail Kalatozov."UFO In Her Eyes. A feature film written and directed by Xiaolu Guo" (page visited on 8 August 2017). It received the Public Award at the Milan 3-Continental Film Festival 2013.
Guo's 2013 film, Late at Night, Voices of Ordinary Madness, focuses on Britain's underclass society, each fighting their ground in their own way. It is the second part of Guo's Tomorrow trilogy, continued after her documentary Once Upon a Time Proletarian. It premiered at the 57th BFI London Film Festival 2013 and the Rotterdam Film Festival 2014, and was exhibited at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
Guo's 2018 documentary feature film, Five Men and a Caravaggio, is inspired by Walter Benjamin's landmark essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936). It premiered at the BFI London Film Festival 2018 and the Athens Avant-Garde Film Festival in Greece, 2018.
In 2020, Guo collaborated with the American Vietnamese filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha on Trinh's new film What About China?.
Her 2025 documentary Three Ways of Returning (in collabaration with Andrea Luka Zimmerman and Mania Akbari) was premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival 2026.
Awards and nominations Guo's third novel, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, inspired by Roland Barthes's work, written originally in broken English, was nominated for the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction and has been translated into 26 languages. She was also the 2005 Pearl Award (UK) winner for Creative Excellence.The 2005 Pearl Awards Her first novel, Village of Stone, was nominated for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize as well as the International Dublin Literary Awards. Guo writes in both English and Chinese, and has served as a jury member for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award. Her 2014 novel I Am China, set in Europe, China and America, was awarded the Italian Giuseppe Acerbi Prize in the special category for young readers in 2015 and was longlisted for the 2015 Women's Prize for Fiction.
Her 2017 book Nine Continents: A Memoir in and out of China was the winner in the autobiography category of the National Books Critics Circle Award. It was shortlisted for the Costa Book Award for Biography and Ondaatje Prize 2017.