Yu Hua (simplified Chinese: 余华; traditional Chinese: 余華; pinyin: Yú Huá) is a Chinese author, born April 3, 1960 in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province. Shortly after his debut as a fiction writer in 1983, Yu Hua was regarded as a promising avant-garde or post-New Wave writer. Many critics also regard him as a champion for Chinese meta-fictional or postmodernist writing. When his writing style changed towards a more “psychologized” narrative in the 1990s and experimented with more chaotic themes like in Brothers, Yu Hua received strong criticism from critics and readers.
Yu Hua has written five novels, six collections of stories, and three collections of essays. His novels have been translated into English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Russian, Italian, Dutch, Czech, Polish, Romanian, Swedish, Hungarian, Serbian, Turkish, Persian, Hebrew, Korean, Mongolian and Malayalam.