"Wives and Concubines" Author: Su Tong Zhejiang People's Publishing House

"Wives and Concubines" is a famous masterpiece of contemporary literary master Su Tong. The novel tells the story of a wealthy businessman, Mr. Chen, who married four women as his wives. In the gloomy and mysterious Chen Mansion, several women fought openly and secretly, just to compete for a little favor from this man. When the 19-year-old female student Songlian married into the Chen Mansion, she was naive and arrogant. She was unwilling to be lonely and eager to pursue herself, but she had to be involved in the war of women. After witnessing the tragic fate of the women of the Chen family, Songlian was eventually tortured into a madman. The novel uses the story of polygamy in this compound to condense the tragic fate of women for thousands of years with delicate and gorgeous words: if a woman attaches herself to a man, she will never be able to dominate her own destiny.

In 1991, Zhang Yimou adapted the film into Raise the Red Lantern, which was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.

In 2006, it was selected as one of the "Top 100 Chinese Novels of the 20th Century";

In 2018, it was rated as one of the "most influential novels in the 40th anniversary of reform and opening up";

The novel has been translated into English, French, Italian, Norwegian, Spanish and other languages ​​and has become popular overseas.

Su Tong

Born in Suzhou, Jiangsu in 1963, he was admitted to the Chinese Department of Beijing Normal University in 1980 and began to publish novels in 1983. He is currently the vice chairman of the Jiangsu Writers Association and a resident writer at Beijing Normal University.

His major representative works include: novellas "The House of Poppies" and "Wives and Concubines", and novels "Rice", "Bodhisattva Man", "My Imperial Career", "Northern City Area", and "The Yellow Bird".

In 2009, he won the third Man Asian Literature Prize

In 2010, he won the Outstanding Writer of the Year Award at the 8th Chinese Literature Media Awards

In 2010, he won the Fifth Lu Xun Literature Award

In 2015, he won the 8th Mao Dun Literature Prize

In 2018, he won the Fifth Wang Zengqi Literature Award

Over the past thirty years, Su Tong has been active in the literary world with his vigorous and steady creative attitude. He is not only an important writer in today's literary world, but also one of the writers who is very popular among readers and attracts great attention from domestic and foreign critics.

Su Tong is good at capturing sounds, colors, light and shadows from a child's and a woman's perspective, and accurately grasping women's subtle emotions. He is known as "the male writer who is best at writing about women."