Yu Hua is a Chinese author. Born in 1960 in Zhejiang, China, Yu finished high school during the Cultural Revolution and worked as a dentist for five years before beginning to write in 1983. His work has been translated into French, German, Italian, Dutch, Japanese, and Korean. In 2002 he became the first Chinese writer to win the prestigious James Joyce Foundation Award. He is the author of To Live (Anchor Books, 2003), Chronicle of a Blood Merchant (Pantheon, 2003), and four short story collections. To Live was made into a movie directed by Zhang Yimou that won the Grand Prize at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival. His latest novel, Seventh Day, was released in 2015. He lives in Beijing.