Career
After completing teacher training,she became a primary school Chinese teacher in 1980. The Cultural Revolution had just ended a few years before,and there was a dearth of children's reading material outside the textbooks. After teaching for a year,she began to write her own stories for the children. Her first story was A Seed in a Swimsuit,about a lotus seed floating in its green swimsuit,inspired by the popular animated film Little Tadpoles Looking for Mama . It was enthusiastically received by her class,and she wrote more than 100 stories in the next few years. [1]
When a Shanghai children's newspaper began publishing her stories,she became more widely known and received a book contract. [1] After teaching for seven years,she started a new job at a publishing house as an editor of children's books. In the early 1990s,she became chief editor at a children's magazine,and began writing a series of short stories known in English as Mo's Mischief ,about a naughty but kind boy named Ma Xiaotiao (Mo Shen Ma in the English version). [1] She says the idea of Ma Xiaotiao came from one of the students she had taught. [4]
In 2000,the publication of her A Girl's Diary brought her national fame. The novel,about a preteen girl modelled after her own daughter,sold two million copies. This success has since been surpassed by her Mo's Mischief series,whose 20 titles had sold more than 30 million copies by 2013. [1] She also wrote the Diary of a Smiling Cat series starting in 2006,targeting children between seven and nine years old. By 2013,she had written 18 books which sold 20 million copies. [1]
HarperCollins has acquired rights to translate her works into other languages. As of 2010,it had translated six books from the Mo's Mischief series into English and sold 200,000 copies of them,with no plans to publish more. [2] Although this figure pales in comparison to sales at home,HarperCollins has been quoted as saying "The performance of Yang’s books is the best among the books we’ve introduced from China to the English-speaking world." [5] Luo Yirong (2015) identified a number of reasons why the series failed to achieve more success in English,including market differences and over-domestification in the translation. [6]
In 2010,she ranked first in the "Fifth China Rich Writers List" [7]
In 2012,she published a collection of essays "Reasons for Loving Zaizai". In November 2019,the enlightenment picture book "Panda Diary" was launched
This page is based on this
Wikipedia article Text is available under the
CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
