Chou Li-Po

Born 1908 in Iyang District, Hunan Province. Chinese writer. Member of the Chinese Communist Party since 1934.

Chou attended the economics faculty of the University of Shanghai. He was imprisoned by the Kuomintang for being implicated in the revolutionary movement. He worked for the Chinese League of Left Writers from 1934 to 1936 and later served in the ranks of the Chinese Red Army. In 1939 he began teaching in the department of literature of the Lu Hsün Academy of Literature and Art in Yenan.

Chou first published his works in 1938. In 1948 he wrote the novel Hurricane (Russian translation, 1951; State Prize of the USSR, 1952). He was also the author of the novel Big Changes in a Mountain Village (parts 1–2, 1958–60); the first part was translated into Russian as Spring Comes to the Mountains (1960), and the second part as Clear Streams (1962). These works depict the socialist reorganization of agriculture. The working class was portrayed in the novel The Molten Iron Flows (1955; translated into Russian as The Steel Stream, 1957). Chou wrote short stories, essays, and critical articles and translated into Chinese A. S. Pushkin’s novel Dubrovskii and M. A. Sholokhov’s novel Virgin Soil Upturned.

Chou was awarded the State Prize of the USSR in 1951.