- Library, The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong

Liu Yichang (劉以鬯)

1918-2018

Liu Yichang is a writer, editor and translator, who has published novels and short stories, as well as essays and articles in newspapers and magazines. Liu was born in Shanghai and he was a keen promoter of new literature in Shanghai. He began his career as a journalist in Chongqing during WWII. He moved to Hong Kong in 1948 and founded Hong Kong Literature (《香港文學》) in 1985, a monthly magazine in which he acted as director until his retirement in 2000. His best-known novel is The Drunkard (《酒徒》). Many other stories written by him are evocative of the speedy, noisy, impersonal but also challenging and open place that Hong Kong is: revealing the coexistence of many worlds, and expressing confusion between past and present, Chinese and Western culture, even things and spirits. His role in introducing Western literature and art in Hong Kong Literature, has been essential to Hong Kong culture.

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Luo Fu (洛夫)

1928-2018

Luo Fu was born in Hengyang of Hunan Province, China. He joined the Republic of China army during the Sino-Japanese War and came to Taiwan in 1949 after the Nationalist army lost the Chinese Civil War. Luo Fu began his career as a poet with youthful lyrics in the 1940s. Together with Chang Mo (張默) and Ya Xian (瘂弦), Luo Fu cofounded the Epoch Poetry Society in 1954 and for more than a decade worked as editor of the Epoch Poetry Quarterly (《創世紀》詩刊). His first book, River of the Soul (《靈河》) was published in 1957. In 1996, he moved to Vancouver, where he lived for 20 years. Luo Fu’s 3,000-line poem Driftwood (《漂木》) was published in 2000 when he was in Canada. In 2001, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Luo Fu was the author of more than 30 volumes of poetry, seven collections of essays, five volumes of literary criticism and eight book-length translations. His poetry has been translated into English, Swedish, French, German, Japanese, and Korean. He was a controversial figure in many literary debates that shaped the evolution of modern Chinese poetry. His poetry had been immensely influential in Taiwan and China.

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Jin Yong (金庸)

1924-2018

Jin Yong is a Hong Kong-based novelist, publisher, and political figure whose martial arts adventures are perhaps the most widely read of all twentieth-century Chinese fiction. Jin Yong serialized his first martial arts novel Book and Sword (《書劍恩仇錄》) in 1955. In 1959, Jing Yong co-founded the Hong Kong newspaper Ming Pao with his high school classmate Shen Baoxin (沈寶新). He served as its editor-in-chief for years, writing both serialized novels and editorials.

After completing The Deer and the Cauldron (《鹿鼎記》) in 1972, Jin Yong spent ten years on revising his 36-volume Complete Works. Though once banned in both Taiwan (for the author’s early associations with the left) and the mainland (for his criticism of the CCP), the novels circulated widely in contraband editions. Furthermore, those novels are now universally available in authorized form, as well as repeatedly adapted into television serials, martial arts films, comic books and video games. They are increasingly credited with transcending the limitations of formula fiction and comprising a significant chapter in the history of modern Chinese fiction.

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Li Ao (李敖)

1935-2018

Li Ao was a Taiwanese writer and political campaigner. He was born in Harbin, China. Li moved to Taiwan at the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949 and studied in history at the National Taiwan University. In 1961, he began writing as the editor-in-chief for a liberal literary magazine called Wen Hsing (文星). During Taiwan’s long decades of martial law, Li emerged as a rare voice of dissent, railing against traditional Chinese culture and the Kuomintang government while advocating for the adoption of Western cultural values like liberalism and democracy. Li was known affectionately as the “madman” of Taiwan’s literary and political circles, a man who vigorously defended freedom of speech. He had spent time in prison for his political views. Li wrote more than 100 books, mostly about history and politics, and more than 90 of them were banned in Taiwan until 1991. His novel, the Fayuan Temple of Beijing (北京法源寺), was shortlisted by Nobel in 2000.

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Lin Yanni (林燕妮)

1943-2018

Lin Yanni was a Hong Kong novelist, columnist, businesswoman, and socialite, often called the “prodigal daughter” of Hong Kong. She was admitted to the University of Berkeley at the age of 17. After graduation, she returned to Hong Kong, studied for a double master’s degree. After that she worked as a columnist, radio DJ and lyricist. She was diligent in writing and became a productive writer in the 1980s. She published more than eighty books, many of which have been adapted into films. She also wrote regular columns for the Ming Pao. Her famous works included “Infatuation”, “Country”, “The League” and “The Burial of Youth” (《痴》、《緣》、《盟》及《青春之葬》). Lin Yanni was praised by Jin Yong as the “best modern woman essayist” and won the second “Hong Kong Artists Federation Best Writer Award.” (香港藝術家聯盟最佳作家獎（1989))

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