Vivid, haunting and unforgettable. 

One writer’s fight to reveal the silenced voices of a city cut off from the world.

In January 2020, Wuhan was placed in total lockdown. The city of eleven million – the centre of China’s coronavirus outbreak – was cut off from the world. As cherry blossoms fell on silent streets, people were left anxious and afraid, struggling to find medicine, food or information about the virus that had trapped them in their homes.

In April 2020, Murong Xuecun, one of China’s most celebrated and silenced literary authors, bravely travelled to the locked-down city, covertly interviewing people from all walks of life on their experiences as the catastrophe unfolded. The result is an unforgettable collection of true stories that captures the voices and griefs of a city, and that Murong had to leave China in order to publish.

Watch Murong’s gripping story of how Deadly Quiet City was published.

Murong Xuecun (nom de plume of Hao Qun) is one of China’s most famous authors. Through his novels and narrative non-fiction, he has been a rare independent voice writing from inside China. Murong’s first novel, Leave Me Alone: A Novel of Chengdu, took China by storm in 2002. His recent books include the novel Dancing Through Red Dust and the non-fiction People’s Literature Prize winner The Missing Ingredient, a work of undercover investigative reporting on a pyramid scheme. Murong has also written for The New York Times since 2011, including an opinion column from 2013 to 2016.

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