Shen Rong

Shen Rong (1936 – 4 February 2024) was a Chinese writer. Her name also appears as Chen Rong.

Biography
Shen was born Shen Derong  in Hankou, Hubei. Because of the political unrest of the time, her family moved frequently, finally settling in Chongqing. She worked as an assistant at a publishing house and studied Russian in Beijing. She then worked as a translator at a radio station but was released in 1963 due to illness. In 1973, she went to live with a peasant family in Shanxi.

Shen began writing in the 1970s, producing the novel The Eternal Spring (Yongyuan shi chuntian). Her story At Middle Age (Ren dao zhongnian) (1980) won a literary award and was made into a movie, catapulting her into the spotlight. In 1991, she published At Old Age (Rendao Iaonian).

In 1983, she wrote the essay Novels strangled in the cradle: My Senseless Literary Battles, which described her difficulties as a writer living through radical shifts in her society's ideology.

Shen died on 4 February 2024, at the age of 88.