The Running Flame and Soft Burial
Fang Fang, translated by Michael Berry
Columbia University Press: 2025
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While extremely well-known in Chinese literary circles, novelist Wang Fang (who publishes as Fang Fang) came to global attention relatively late in her career. Her “Fang Fang Diary” originally appeared as a series of posts on Weibo, documenting the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic from its epicentre. It evolved into a fascinating document of a city under siege.

By early April 2020, the diary had 380 million views, prompting 94,000 comments and 8,210 discussion threads from within the Great Firewall. As well as tracking the government’s response to the emerging epidemic, the posts became a cri de cœur against internet censorship and the limited flow of information around and about the disease. The translator Michael Berry went to incredible lengths—translating roughly 5,000 words a day—to ensure the English edition could be published a mere three weeks after Fang Fang wrote her last entry in Chinese. The result, Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City, is composed largely of anonymous interviews with other people in the locked-down city of Wuhan, and it turned Fang Fang’s life upside down.

• Tags: China, Fang Fang, Issue 41, Paul French