Chinese-British author and film-maker Xiaolu Guo left China two decades ago to live in London. A writer of novels and memoirs, she has been shortlisted for the Women’s prize and won the US National Book Critics Circle award in 2017. Her work explores migration and alienation, as well as memory. Her provocative new title, Radical: A Life of My Own, takes the form of a diary-like dictionary, fusing autobiography with an exploration of language as she describes the personal crisis that ensued when she sought to claim creative freedom by leaving her family to take a teaching role on another continent, and became erotically entangled with a linguist she names “E”.
How did your new book come about?
Originally, it arose as a lexicon of the female world, of our struggles and freedoms and duties, but an alternative title could be The Book of Separations – separation from my language and my original culture, from the ones I love. And a separation from my second home, which is Britain.
