2021-2022 (Track A)

Support a New Scholar Awardee:

Lyu Guangzhao

Lyu Guangzhao

Brief Bio

Lyu Guangzhao is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at University College London (UCL). Apart from his Ph.D. studies listed below, Guangzhao is the co-founder of the London Chinese Sci-Fi Group since April 2019, organizing monthly reading groups that featured contemporary Chinese SF novels and short stories. After March 2020, due to the pandemic lockdown, the reading group was moved online and became attractive for the audience both within and beyond the UK, which has increased its reputation among the circles of Chinese SF studies. Meanwhile, Guangzhao is also a co-director of the London Science Fiction Research Community. He was in charge of the Chinese stream of the 2020 LSFRC annual conference (six panelists) and invited Chen Qiufan (author of Waste Tide) and Emily Jin (well-known SF translator) for related roundtables. Guangzhao is generally interested in science fiction studies, utopian studies, apocalypse literature, neoliberalism or late capitalism, postmodernism, and literary geography.

Research Summary

Guangzhao’s Ph.D. project focuses on the comparison between the British SF Boom (Iain M. Banks, Ken MacLeod, China Miéville, etc.) and the Chinese SF New Wave (Liu Cixin, Han Song, Chen Qiufan, etc.), both of which started to take shape around the 1990s. This was an age when the UK was increasingly dependent on neoliberal values under the regimes of Margret Thatcher and the New Labour and when China was moving towards post-socialist modernity that welcomed individual responsibility and market competition. In my study, I believe these two SF movements can provide an alternative viewpoint to interrogate the broader social, cultural, and ideological transitions in both countries, and vice versa.

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