Ma Jian is a Chinese writer exiled in the UK. His books include “The Noodle Maker,” “Nine Forked Roads,” “Thinking,” and “Red Dust,” which won the 2002 Thomas Cook International Travel Literature Award in the UK. In 2005, he was named one of the 50 most important writers in the world in the 21st century by French literary magazine Lire. Many of his novels have been translated into nearly 30 languages and distributed around the world, and he was nominated as a candidate for the Swedish Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013 and 2014.