Can Xue, meaning “dirty snow,” “leftover snow,” but also “pure snow on the top of a mountain,” is the pseudonym of Deng Xiaohua. She was born in 1953 in Changsha City, Hunan Province; her parents were sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, and she completed only elementary school. Read More  Can Xue learned English on her own and wrote books on Borges, Shakespeare, and Dante. Her publications in English include Dialogues in Paradise, Old Floating Cloud, Frontier, Blue Light in the Sky, The Embroidered Shoes, Five Spice Street, Vertical Motion, Barefoot Doctor, The Last Lover, Love in the New Millennium, and I Live in the Slums. The Last Lover won the 2015 Best Translated Book Award for Fiction and was longlisted for the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and Love in the New Millennium and I Live in the Slums were longlisted for the 2019 and 2021 Booker International Prizes, respectively. She is frequently mentioned as a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature.