Alice Xin Liu is an award-winning writer and translator living in Beijing with 17 years of experience working in the China field. Born in China, she left aged seven and was educated in Britain, graduating from Durham University studying English Literature. Since arriving in Beijing in 2007 she has worked as a news assistant for the Guardian, China Editor for Index on Censorship, editor at the Financial Times-affiliated Danwei.org (founded by Jeremy Goldkorn), and as Managing Editor of Pathlight: New Chinese Writing, with Paper Republic. Here is a list of Pathlight issues that Alice edited. Alice has translated three books: The Letters of Shen Congwen (Yilin Publishing House), The Problem with Me: And Other Essays on Making Trouble in China by Han Han (Simon and Schuster) and The Road Home by Ai Wei, which is a Penguin Special. Her freelance writings have appeared in n+1, Granta, the Guardian, Asymptote and other places. She was working on a novel and has been writing about her Malaysian Communist granny, who died in January 2023. On the blog on this site she has been trying to write about herself and her family in a non-fiction form, and has a literary agent working with her on this. Here’s a piece of queer short fiction published on the NüVoices website.
Alice also translates subtitles, with most of them by the Chinese film director Feng Xiaogang. One of her recent subtitles is for the documentary Wuhan Wuhan, which won the Doc Edge Film Festival for Best International Feature in 2021. She also worked on Foolish Bird, a feature film from 2017 by the filmmakers Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka, as well as one of their follow-up films. In 2013 she participated in the Literary Death Match. Her Twitter: @axliu
In 2019 and 2021 Alice spoke at Duke Kunshan University in Suzhou, China on the topic of translation, co-teaching a class in 2019 for MediaArt101 with Professor Kim Hunter Gordon and working with Professor Austin Woerner in 2021 to bring a talk to his Literature students, as well as sitting in on Literature and Creative Writing class.
In June 2022 she participated, along with Gigi Chang, in a translation slam organised by Paper Republic, the Confucius Institute, and the University of Aberdeen, translating an excerpt from martial arts fiction, wuxia. In November 2022, the film Son of the Earth (directed by Wang Ningtong 王宁彤), subtitled by Alice, won Best Documentary Film at the Cinematography Awards. She was recently interviewed by Haig Bailan at the Beijing Sessions podcast. Here is a starting point with her work as managing editor of the magazine of literary translation from Chinese, Pathlight: New Chinese Writing.
Alice co-founded the women’s collective NüVoices and brainchilded the NüVoices podcast, which you can find here. She’s a fan of hiking and post-rock shows, and eating. Her Granta page is here, and her nplusone translation and essay is here: No One Fought Back Then.
