Fan Wen was born in Sichuan Province in November 1962 and currently lives in Kunming. He is a first rate national author and currently vice chairman of the Yunnan Province Writers Association, permanently stationed there hosting meetings. After graduating from university, Fan Wen worked at the Yunnan Geology and Minerals Bureau and began publishing his writing in 1986. Thus far, he has published more than 6 million Chinese characters in literary works of various themes and genres, and published 16 literary works, including novels, novellas, short stories, essays and reports. These have been translated into English, French, Italian and other languages. Fan Wen is obsessed with snow-capped mountain valleys and vast highland pastures. Several of his works focus on reflecting the Tibetan people’s real lives and historical culture, such as “The Tibetan Trilogy”, The Milky Way, Sorrowful Earth, and The Song of the Land, reflecting “Bixhai Village” on the Yunnan-Vietnam Railway, and works that reflect the history of the War of Resistance against Japan in My Blood and Earth, Chongqing Eye and so on. He has won nominations for the 7th, 8th and 9th Mao Dun Literary Prize, the 8th and the 11th October Literary Award, and the 4th People’s Literature Biennial Award for Novels.
In 1999, a visit to the Yunnan-Tibet rail line completely changed Fan Wen’s creative direction. He began to use a writer’s eyes to examine some of the questions that were never seen or rarely considered in the worldly life of the city: the people and their history, culture, religion, beliefs, nature, and their relationships with other people, their relationships with human nature, and their relationships with human destiny. Prof. Chen Xiaoming of the Chinese Faculty of Peking University believes that Fan Wen’s writing is “using love to explain the value of life and using love to retell the history and life experiences of Tibet”. The famous critic Li Jingze also commented that Fan Wen is “a writer who has always engaged in writing with love and respect towards the history and culture of our country and its people."
The Milky Way is the first book in the “Tibet Trilogy.” Against the backdrop of the changes occurring at the eastern fringe of Tibet over the course of a century, where the Living Buddha of Tibetan Buddhism, the representative of the Naxi Dongba religion, Christian missionaries, and the cadres of the Red Han people were created, as well as the image of fearless characters such as Kamba, a famous Tibetan. The novel contains serious considerations in an atmosphere where religion and reality are intertwined, ethnic groups are mixed together, and many different cultures clash and mix.
Sorrowful Earth shows us the true living conditions of the Tibetan people through the grudges and enmities of two families on both sides of the Lancang River. The epic poems express the rich spiritual connotations of good and evil, humans and nature, and humanity and divinity, thus making the theme of sadness show amazing power, and also shows us a painting from the Tibetan region in the first half of the 20th century.
The Song of the Land seeks to demystify the Tibetan culture, sanctify Buddhism, with compassionate writing about the Tibetan culture and Buddhism, singing the love of human nature, the great meaning of redemption, the steadfastness of truth, and the devotion of faith, thickly and heavily outlining the magnificent, mysterious and ethereal Tibetan cultural history and customs.
Fan Wen’s recent work, The Eye of Chongqing, is a novel based on the theme of the “Chongqing Bombing” during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression. Based on strong patriotism, the work vividly shows the experiences of suffering and love in the world of the protagonists Lin Peiyao, Liu Yunxiang, and Deng Ziru in the war, as well as the exposing of Japanese right-wing forces in their overlooking of history by representatives of the “Chongqing Bombing” victims.
