Liu Jianwei was born in Zhenping County, Henan Province in October 1963. He is currently a member of the presidium of the Chinese Writers Association and a member of the China Film Association. In 1985, he began to publish literary works and has published a total of seven novels. His representative works include the novels The Great Wall, Heroic Time, Breakthrough, and SARS Crisis, all of which describe the changes of life in China over the past seven decades. His works have won the Mao Dun Literature Award, Feng Mu Literature Award, Xia Yan Film Literature Award, and so on. Some works have been translated into Vietnamese and other languages. He is also a screenplay writer and fourteen of his screenplays have been turned into films.
Liu Jianwei has studied at several universities and has obtained a bachelor's degree in engineering and a master's degree in literature. In his youth, he aspired to be a “writer of social history” like the classical French writer Balzac, and leave behind a secret history of the nation for China in which great changes are taking place. He paid attention to the classic Western authors: Shakespeare, Dostoevsky and Stendhal. At the same time, he used the classic Chinese writers Cao Xueqin and Lu Xun as teachers to write about the major and profound changes that have taken place in China over the past seven decades. His novels have an epic character and a rich encyclopedic style. There are many characters in his works, including many classic literary characters that are widely representative, extremely unique in personality, and profoundly spiritual.
By describing the great changes that have taken place in China over the past seventy years in the novels The Great Wall, Heroic Time, and Breakthrough, Liu Jianwei has become one of the most important contemporary writers in China. His The Great Wall is praised as a realist masterpiece of contemporary China. Critics have said it describes China as powerfully as Ordinary World, The Ancient Ship, and White Deer Plain. Heroic Time, for which he won the Mao Dun Literature Award, is a mature novel that describes China's dramatic changes. Several of his masterpieces have been published over nearly two decades and have been continuously welcomed by Chinese readers. To date, more than ten versions have been published and the total sales volume is close to one million.
The Great Wall is a novel that writes about life below the county level in China. The story takes place over the course of 50 years. It begins in the late 1940s and stretches up to the early 1990s. All of the major historical events of this period are written about, so the book can be said to be an encyclopaedia when it comes to life in county-level China. To understand the miracles created by China today, The Great Wall can be called an excellent guide map and specimen. China has now become the second largest economy in the world and Heroic Time is one of the best literary books that explain why this Chinese miracle happened. This work writes about important changes in the social and economic life of a provincial capital city over the course of a year in China 20 years ago, but it can be called an allegory of China today and tomorrow. It reflects the writer’s predictions in social development trends.
