Female readers find solace and feminism in Sally Rooney

When the manuscript of Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends first arrived in Peng Lun’s inbox, he hesitated.

- Helen Sullivan

It was 2017, and Peng had just started his own publishing house in Shanghai, Archipel Press. He had heard about the heated auction for the rights to the young author’s first novel and thought it might be worth having it translated into simplified Chinese.

“Her writing is simple but very, very fresh,” he said. He acquired the rights, commissioned a translation and watched as an Irish author in her mid-20s became one of the most beloved novelists in the world.

In 2019, Conversations with Friends was published in China. Chinese readers have since bought 150,000 copies of Rooney’s novels, a high number for any author – for translated fiction, more than 30,000 is considered a bestseller.

Since 2017, something else has been happening in China: the government has cracked down on feminist movements, seeing them as a subversion of the idea that communism has already liberated women.

Anecdotal evidence is that instead of taking to the streets, young women are turning to novels, podcasts and feminist nonfiction to learn more about feminism. A 2021 study by Fan Yang, a lecturer at the Hangzhou Normal University in Zhejiang, found that the number of feminist podcasts increased from eight to 35 in two years.