Xialou Guo

Xiaolu Guo is a novelist, essayist, and filmmaker. She grew up in the Chinese province of Zhejiang, which she left in 1993 to earn an MA at the Beijing Film Academy. She moved to London in 2002, and in 2013 was named one of Granta’s Best of the Young British Novelists. She has made a number of films including the feature She, a Chinese (2009)—a response to Jean-Luc Goddard’s 1967 La Chinoise—which won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno International Film Festival. Her 2011 feature UFO in Her Eyes is a cinematic adaptation of her novel of the same title, about upheaval in a small Chinese village following a UFO sighting. Her 2018 documentary feature Five Men and a Caravaggio was inspired by Walter Benjamin. In 2019, the Whitechapel Gallery in London held a complete retrospective of her films. Her third novel, “A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers” (2008)—the first of her books to be written in English— was nominated for the Orange Prize and has been translated into 26 languages. Her memoir, “Nine Continents,” received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography in 2017. Following in Barthes’ footsteps, her most recent novel is titled “A Lover’s Discourse” (forthcoming in 2020).

Xiaolu will be teaching JRN 3650 Workshop: Film and Television Writing.

Fall 2020 JRN 3650/3650H: Film and Television Writing