Murong Xuecun

Early life and education Murong Xuecun, whose real name is Hao Qun, was born in 1974 in a mountainous hamlet near Baishan, Jilin province, China. His parents were farmers, and when he was two years old, they moved to rural Shandong province. He has described his childhood as impoverished, with a scarcity of books; during harvest seasons, village storytellers narrated tales of historical heroes and spirits, which inspired his interests in reading.

Murong graduated from the China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing in 1996, where he studied law. He served as head of a campus literature club for his longstanding love for novels and poetry.

Leave Me Alone was published on Tianya and two other internet communities.

In his acceptance speech for the Prize, Murong wrote a scathing commentary about his editor that he worked with for China: In the absence of a remedy. He also launched into a critique of the state of censorship in China in general. The speech was banned at the awards ceremony, but made its rounds across the internet. In the draft, Murong alluded to a wide array of censorship restrictions, including limits on discussing current affairs, contemporary personalities, and being forced to change the phrase "Chinese people" to "some people" in parts of his work. More obscure restrictions were also discussed, such as scrubbing the use of "Henan people" because it carries the air of regional discrimination, and removing references to "India-flavoured farts" because the editor was concerned about a diplomatic rift between China and India. Murong wrote that "The only truth is that we cannot speak the truth. The only acceptable viewpoint is that we cannot express a viewpoint. We cannot criticise the system, we cannot discuss current affairs, we cannot even mention distant Ethiopia."

From 2011 to 2016, state security agents harassed him frequently, including 40 informal interrogation sessions (nicknamed "drinking tea 喝茶"), two occurrence of house arrest, and pressure that cut off his income sources. He contributed opinion pieces to The New York Times from 2013 to 2016, critiquing government policies and censorship. In 2016, he co-founded a WeChat account called Seven Writers for critical essays, but it was shut down after six months.

Exile and later work In April 2020, shortly before Wuhan's lockdown was lifted, Murong travelled to the city and spent about a month secretly interviewing more than thirty residents. He focused on the stories of eight ordinary people for his book Deadly Quiet City: True Stories from Wuhan including an exhausted doctor, an illegal taxi driver, and a citizen journalist, among others. Fearing state repercussions more than the virus itself, he left Wuhan in May and spent the next eight months writing the manuscript in a hotel at the foot of Mount Emei in Sichuan, deleting each chapter from his laptop after sending it to his Australian editor.

By mid-2021, with the book in final editing and thirty-eight acquaintances already detained for criticizing the government's pandemic response, Murong realized he would likely be arrested if he stayed in China. On 7 August 2021, he left Beijing with a single suitcase, flew to Hong Kong and then London, and eventually settled in Melbourne, Australia, where he now lives in exile.

Deadly Quiet City was published in Australia in 2022 and in the United States in 2023. It documents the fear, suffering and propaganda experienced by ordinary Wuhan residents during the world's first and strictest COVID-19 lockdown.

In exile, Murong has said he feels “liberated from a cage” and can now “write anything I want.” He is completing a screenplay about Liu Xiaobo and writing a novel about a dissident poet and his secret-police handler. Dancing Through Red Dust (原谅我红尘颠倒, 2008) The Missing Ingredient (中国，少了一味药, 2010) Deadly Quiet City: Stories From Wuhan, COVID Ground Zero (禁城：武汉传来的声音, 2022)