Xia Jia is a rising star of Chinese science fiction, and we are proud to host her during her first visit to Norway.

This conversation will draw on Xia Jia’s series of short stories entitled “The Chinese Encyclopedia”, where she speculates on ordinary people’s life in China of the near future. What can we extrapolate from her work when looking from a western perspective? What are the common anxieties and fantasies in our global society?

As one of the most promising voices of Chines science fiction, Xia Jia is a writer as well as a scholar of the science-fiction genre. To date, she has published three novels in Chinese and her short fiction works have won five Galaxy Awards for Chinese Science Fiction and six Nebula Awards for Science Fiction and Fantasy in Chinese. A selection of her short works has been translated into Czech, Italian, Japanese and Polish.

The conversation is hosted by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay who is a researcher in the Lifetimes project at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo, where he leads investigations in new forms of science fiction including climate fiction and quantum fiction. He is co-Editor in Chief of Fafnir: Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research (FINFAR, Finland), and editor at the Journal of Science Fiction (MOSF, Washington, D.C.). He is also the founding editor of the Routledge book series Studies in Global Genre Fiction with Taryne Taylor, founding member of “The Kalpana” with artists Susanne Winterling and Goutam Ghosh. His recent publications include Indian Genre Fiction: Pasts and Future Histories(Routledge), and All Borders are Temporary (TrAP, Oslo).