Jo Riley

Josephine Riley is a British writer, translator, theatre actor, and schoolteacher. Dr. Riley has written and translated several books about theatre arts, especially Chinese theatre. She currently teaches film and drama in the United Kingdom.

Riley reads, writes, and speaks Mandarin Chinese, and is better known for having in the early 1980s widely traveled in China and learned to act in the Chinese theatre She also made the first English translation of The Other Shore by Nobel Laureate in Literature playwright Gao Xingjian.

Biography

Life

Jo Riley graduated from the University of Cambridge. After working for a number of small touring companies, she went to Asia to explore a different kind of theatre. In the early 1980s, after learning Mandarin Chinese, she was one of the first foreign students at the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing, Indeed:

Riley also made, under the title The Other Side (1997), the first English translation of the controversial play The Other Shore (1986) by Nobel Laureate in Literature playwright Gao Xingjian.