Xiaolu Guo FRSL (Chinese: 郭小橹; born 20 November 1973[2]) is a Chinese-born British author, filmmaker and academic.

Her writing and films explore migration, alienation, memory, personal journeys, feminism, translation and transnational identities.

[3] She was an inaugural fellow of the Columbia Institute of Ideas and Imagination in Paris, 2018, and a jury member for the Man Booker Prize 2019.

Xiaolu Guo grew up with her illiterate grandparents in a village of fishermen in Shitang, then with her parents and brother in the city of Wenling, both in the Chinese coastal province of Zhejiang.

Guo's 2008 novel, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers,[6] is the first one that she wrote in English after publishing her several Chinese books.

The novel was adapted into a feature film, produced by Turkish German filmmaker Fatih Akin and directed by Xiaolu Guo herself.

Guo's 2010 novel, 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth,[9] is a coming-of-age story about a 21-year-old Chinese woman Fenfang, her life as a film extra in Beijing, to where she has travelled far to seek her fortune, only to encounter a Communist regime that has outworn its welcome, a city in varying degrees of development, and sexism more in keeping with her peasant upbringing than the country's supposedly progressive capital.

Guo's 2010 book, Lovers in the Age of Indifference, is a collection of short stories that depicts the lives of people adrift between the West and the East, set in various locations.

As the translator tracks the lovers' 20-year relationship, she develops a sense of purpose in deciding to bring Jian and Mu together again before it is too late.

[15] In 2020, her novel A Lover's Discourse was released by Grove Atlantic in the US and Penguin Random House (Chatto) in the UK, and was shortlisted for the 2020 Goldsmiths Prize.

Guo's 2006 film, How Is Your Fish Today?, inspired by Alain Robbe-Grillet's Trans-Europ-Express (1966) is a docu-drama set in modern China, focusing on the intertwined stories of two main characters; a frustrated writer (Rao Hui) and the subject of his latest film script, Lin Hao (Zijiang Yang).

[citation needed] Guo's 2013 film, Late at Night, Voices of Ordinary Madness, focuses on Britain's underclass society, each fighting their ground in their own way.

[21] Guo's 2018 documentary feature Five Men and a Caravaggio, is inspired by Walter Benjamin's landmark essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936).

[23] Guo's third novel, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, inspired by Roland Barthes's work, written originally in broken English, was nominated for the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction and it has been translated into 26 languages.

[24] Her first novel Village of Stone was nominated for the Independent Best Foreign Fiction Prize as well as the International Dublin Literary Awards.

She writes in both English and Chinese, and has served as a jury member for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and International Dublin Literary Award.

[30] In 2022 Guo was commissioned by the Swiss Television RSI and Locarno Film Festival, directed a short documentary Rocks Remember.