Lu Ping was born in Taiwan’s southern city of Kaohsiung in 1953. With her works encompassing a broad range of genres and media, Lu has established herself as a prominent member of the island nation’s literati.
Lu originally attended National Taiwan University’s Department of Psychology, before moving to the United States to study at the University of Iowa. It was during the 1980s, whilst Lu Ping was working in the United States that she first started rising to prominence for her prose, winning a competition for her short story “Death in a Cornfield” in 1983.
Lu Ping continued her rise on Taiwan’s literature throughout the 1980s, writing for several of Taiwan’s most popular newspapers and published her first novel “Chun ge” in 1986. By the 1990s, Lu Ping had established herself as one of Taiwan’s most renowned writers, with her 1995 novel, “Love and Revolution”, attracting widespread attention. Re-imaging the romance between Sun Yat-sen and Soong Ching-ling, the book explores their marital relations, emotions, and Soong’s life as a widow. The book eventually received an English translation in 2006, being published by Columbia University Press.
Another one of Lu’s better-known works was published in 2002. Entitled “The Story of Teresa”, the book focused on the famous mandopop singer Teresa Teng. Lu had also become the editorial writer for The China Times, writing on cultural criticism and feminism, whilst also lecturing on these subjects at major Taiwanese universities.
In 2003, Lu became the director of the Cultural Division at the Kwang Hwa Information and Cultural Center in Hong Kong, working to advance cultural relations and exchanges between the city and Taiwan. One of her most notable contributions was the founding of the Taiwan Culture Festival in Hong Kong, which has brought two months of exhibitions, screenings and shows to the territory on an annual basis since 2006. During this period, Lu occasionally wrote for the Hong Kong dailies, including the South China Morning Post and Ming Pao.
Throughout the 2010s, Lu Ping has continued to play an important role on Taiwan’s literature scene, releasing “The River Darkens” in 2015 and then a collection of autobiographical essays, “Heart Mandala” in 2017. Now serving as the chairperson of Radio Taiwan International, Lu Ping continues to make an impact on Taiwanese literature, with her being translated into English, French, Japanese, Korean and Czech.