Li, Ang: SEX, FOOD AND POLITICS （食色性也）
Date and time: 1830-2030, Monday, 7th September 2015
Venue: Lecture Theatre, Kensington Central Library
12 Phillimore Walk, Kensington, London, W8 7RX
Events of the day
1830-1915 Li Ang’s Lecture
1915-1945 Q&A with Li Ang and Chia-Ling Yang
1945-2030 Reception
About Li Ang 李昂
Li Ang, a prominent woman writer from Taiwan, has made tremendous contribution to women’s literature around the world with her persistent, in-depth investigation of the intriguing intertwining of gender and politics in social life and literary creation. Beginning her writing career at the age of sixteen, she has published nearly twenty novels including collections of short stories. Many of her major works have been translated in different languages, published world-wide, reviewed by The New York Times and other major newspapers in many countries, and made into films and T.V. serious. In 2004, Li Ang was awarded “ The Chevalier de L’ordre des Arts des Lettres” by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication as an acknowledgement of her literary achievement.
Born in 1952, Li Ang grew up in Lu-Kang--a historical town in the central part of Taiwan. She published her first short story “Flower Season” at the age of sixteen. The publication of “Butcher’s Wife” in 1983, that established Li Ang as one of the most important contemporary writers in Taiwan. The Nobel Prize winner Mr. Kenzaburo Oe said there are two best contemporary woman writers in Chinese，one of them is Li Ang from Taiwan.
While gender politics surfaces strongly in her early writing, Li Ang began to examine the intertwining of gender and politics in the reconstruction of historical narratives after the lifting of martial law in Taiwan in 1987. The publication of four majors novels in the 1990s--including Garden of Riddles (1990), The Incense Burner of Lust (1997 ), Autobiography : A Novel (2000 novel), The Visible Ghost (2003) , and many other works—open up new dimension of gender writing in literature as Li Ang combine critical reflections on postcolonial politics with gender politics to examine the questions of women in Taiwan. She has also helped raise the profile of non-Western women’s literature in the international arena.
Recently she has focused on food, having published Menu Desgustation (novel 2007) and other novels include “The Taiwanese／Chinese Lover”（novel 2008）, “The Possed”.（novel 2011）
