Yu Hua (simplified Chinese: 余华; traditional Chinese: 余華; pinyin: Yú Huá; born April 3, 1960 in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province) is a Chinese author. Shortly after his debut as a fiction writer in 1983, his first breakthrough came in 1987, when he released the short story On the Road at Age Eighteen. Yu Hua was regarded as a promising avant-garde or post-New Wave writer. Many critics also regard him as a champion for Chinese meta-fictional or postmodernist writing. His novels To Live (1993) and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant (1995) were widely acclaimed. When he experimented with more chaotic themes like in Brothers (2005–06), Yu Hua received criticism from critics and readers.Yu Hua has written five novels, six collections of stories, and three collections of essays. His novels have been translated into English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Russian, Italian, Dutch, Czech, Polish, Romanian, Swedish, Hungarian, Serbian, Turkish, Persian, Hebrew, Korean, Mongolian Malayalam and Danish.