Ma Lihua, a Han Chinese, was born in Ji’nan, Shandong Province, PR China. In 1976, after graduating in Chinese Studies from Linyi Normal University, she went to Tibet and stayed there for 27 years. In 1990 she earned an MA in Literature at the Peking University. She was an editor of the Chinese journal Tibetan Literature and served as the vice-chair of both the Writers’ Association of Tibet and the Tibet Federation of Literary and Art Circles.
During her years in Tibet she became addicted to the beauty of the Land of Snows and the kindness of its people. She started to conduct fieldwork in order to become better acquainted with the Tibetan people, their daily life, rites, and religion. She has authored a total of twenty works on subjects related to Tibet, primarily in the genre of documentary literature, and a variety of her works has been published in Hong Kong and Taiwan. English and French editions of Traveling Through Northern Tibet have been published by Chinese Literature Publishing House.
In the beginning of the 90s, Ma Lihua produced the television series Tibetan Culture as a byproduct of her on-the-spot fieldwork. During her time in Tibet, she already began publishing poetry and prose about her life there, which soon attracted the attention of a wide readership. Li Jingze 李敬泽, a famous Chinese literary critic, once called her a 20th Century “discoverer of Tibet”.
Although she has enjoyed a successful career as a literary author, she has developed an increasing interest in academic investigations of the culture and history of Tibet. In 2003 she took over the position as editor in chief of the China Tibetology Publishing House in Beijing, a position she maintained until 2011. Recently, she has concentrated her efforts on the history of scientific investigations conducted in Tibet.
Ma Lihua has been honored with numerous prizes, among them the Qomolangma Prize (1992) for Tibetan studies. For her nonfiction series Travels in Tibet (including Traveling Through Northern Tibet, Going West to Ngari, and Souls Are Like the Wind, as well as The Red Mountains of Eastern Tibet, she won the Outstanding Bestsellers prize. In 2009, A Classic of Weathered Stories: 15 Tibetan Historical Tales received the National Library of China’s 5th Wenjin Book Award. |
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