Zhou Meisen is a fiction writer and screenwriter and now serves as the Vice President of the Jiangsu Writers’ Association.

Influenced by Balzac and Dickens, his works are characterised by strong realism and plot twists. In his works readers can find a focus on under-class characters’ destinies and critiques of injustices from the suppressive political forces on individuals. . His novel Made in China was  a winner of the National Book Award and National Bestseller Award. His other works include a twelve-volume Zhou Meisen Anthology and the TV script for In the Name of the People, among others.

One Night In Liverpool

In May 1945, Chinese sailor Fang Ninghao joins a British cargo ship that is transporting wounded Allied soldiers back to Liverpool. On arrival, he meets Emma, a nurse, and the two fall in love. Fang gifts Emma a Yuhua Stone from his hometown of Nanjing, teasing that she will one day marry just such a stone. In their excitement, they decide to take the train to Manchester together to ask for her father’s blessing. But that night, Fang mysteriously disappears without a trace. Heartbroken and desperate, Emma boards the train to Manchester alone.

Sixty years later, a farewell letter and a Yuhua Stone arrive in Liverpool, delivered into the hands of Emma, now white-haired and fading into dementia. In the intervening decades, she has continued to regularly return to Liverpool Station and wait in vain for a man who has never shown. The rumour in her city is that she is cursed by the stone – that her love will never land. But at last, she has word of her lover’s death… as well as the truth behind a long-buried historical tragedy.

From Nanjing to Liverpool, the stone’s curse weaves together past and present in a haunting transnational love story, and brings to light a dark chapter of WWII history – the forced, secret deportation of Chinese sailors – that reminds us of the need for greater love, courage, peace and compassion in our fractured world.