Liu Xiaobin

Although she has worked closely with the mainstream entertainment industry, Xu Xiaobin, a CCTV screenwriter, thinks herself as detached from the center and takes "escaping" as the one of the enduring themes of her writing.

Escaping fate and family lineage permeates Feathered Serpent (1998), a thrilling and lyrical saga following the lives of five generations of women, beginning in the late Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).

The book was translated into English by John Gibbon and published by Simon & Schuster in 2009. Its copyright has been sold in seven other languages.

"People's inner cultural cores are difficult to translate," Xu says, "but they are the most touching parts, deep down in human nature."

Born in Beijing in 1951, Xu entered the literary scene in the late 1980s. Her novel Pisces (1995) won the much coveted Lu Xun Literary Prize, and Princess Der Ling (2004) has been adapted for television.

In her latest book, The Flower of Purgatory (2010), a magical tale about people in the TV/film circle, Xu says she risks subverting her own style and attempts a non-tragic ending. Xu names all the characters after various hallucinogenic plants. "For the novel, I tried to put the realistic fruits into a magically surreal basket," she says.