An extract from Ninth Building by Zou Jingzhi, translated by Jeremy Tiang
Read an extract from Ninth Building by Zou Jingzhi and translated by Jeremy Tiang, which was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2023
A fascinating collection of vignettes based on the author’s life in China during the Cultural Revolution.
Revisiting his experiences as a boy in Beijing and then as a teenager exiled to the countryside, Zou captures a side of the Cultural Revolution that is seldom talked about - the sheer tedium and waste of young life under the regime, as well as the gallows humour that accompanies such desperate situations.
Ninth Building was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2023, announced on March 14 2023.
Zou Jingzhi
About the Author
Zou Jingzhi is highly regarded in China as a fiction writer, poet, essayist, screenwriter and playwright.
Jeremy Tiang
About the Translator
Jeremy Tiang is a novelist, playwright, literary translator and former International Booker Prize judge.A kaleidoscopic and understated collection of interlocking tales of life in an apartment building under the Cultural Revolution – the daily tedium of its inhabitants, lit by brief and tenuous moments of shared humanity.
— The International Booker Prize 2023 panel of judges on 'Ninth Building'
