Renowned Chinese Author Is In A Class Of His Own
Famous writer Yu Hua held an open writing course titled " Plague Nights of Pamuk" at Beijing Normal University on December 14th.
As one of China's most prominent contemporary writers, Yu has published novels, including To Live , which have been translated into several languages, including French, English, and Korean. A film adaptation of Zhang Yimou's novel has become a Chinese classic.
La Revue de Paris recently interviewed Yu, the first Chinese writer to appear in the pages of this famous literary magazine.
As a professor at the International Writing Center of Beijing Normal University, Yu's literature lectures have always fascinated readers. Through live streaming, his lecture reached a wider audience of off-campus literature lovers.
Yu said at the beginning of the class that discussing Nights of Plague was a "difficult task" because he had to convince everyone to read the book while avoiding spoilers.
"Pamu wrote with a lot of patience, and we need patience to read his book. When you finish reading the novel, you will find it much more fascinating than I can say," he said.
Plague Nights , written in 2016 by Turkish writer and Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk, is set in the turbulent context of the Ottoman Empire in 1901. The story takes place on the fictional island of Mingheria in the Levant, located in the eastern Mediterranean. There is Crete and Crete Cyprus, ravaged not only by imperial threats, but also by a deadly epidemic.
Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II sends his most experienced quarantine expert to the island to control the epidemic, then is assassinated. The sultan sends a second doctor to the island to fight the plague and discover his predecessor's killer.
Yu completed the 600-page novel in just a few days during the first semester. He said that although the novel tells an early 20th century story, it is a contemporary story.
