Wu Ming-Yi’s novel about bicycles, elephants and war - which is also a startlingly intimate meditation on memory, family and home
Wu Ming-Yi
One of Taiwan's most innovative young novelists, Wu Ming-Yi was born in Taipei, Taiwan, in 1971
He has won the China Times Open Book Award six times. He is also an associate professor at National Dong Hwa University in Hualian, Taiwan and an expert of the history of Taiwanese environmental literature. He was first recognized for two book-length works of literary essays about butterflies, Butterfly Way (2000) and Beguiled by Butterflies (2003), before publishing his first novel, Routes of Slumber, in 2007. In 2013, The Man with the Compound Eyes, a metafictional ecological disaster novel, was translated into English by Darryl Sterk and published by Harvill Secker to widespread acclaim. It was the first novel from Taiwan to be published by a major English-language publisher and has been translated into nine languages.