Ma Yuan (马原) was born in North-eastern China in 1953 and moved to Lhasa in 1983
where he began to write fiction. As one of the leading authors within the ‘avant-garde’
movement of the 1980s, Ma Yuan is often claimed to be China’s first author of
postmodernist metafiction. Ma Yuan currently resides in the mountain region of
Yunnan province along China’s border with Myanmar and continues to publish novels
with his most recent work, Guniangzhai (姑娘寨), published in 2018.