The Peasant Prince

About the Author

Li Cunxin (Author) Li Cunxin AO was born in 1961 in the Li Commune, near the city of Qingdao on the coast of north-east China. The sixth of seven sons in a poor rural family, Li's peasant life in Chairman Mao's communist China changed dramatically when, at the age of eleven, he was chosen by Madame Mao's cultural advisers to become a student at the Beijing Dance Academy. After a summer school in America, for which he was one of only two students chosen, he defected to the West and became a principal dancer for the Houston Ballet and The Australian Ballet. Li went on to become one of the best male dancers in the world. He then made a career transition to finance and was a senior manager in a major stockbroking firm in Australia. He lived with his wife, Mary, and their three children, Sophie, Tom and Bridie, in Melbourne for over seventeen years until his appointment as the Artistic Director of Queensland Ballet in 2012. In 2019, Li was named an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in the Queen's Birthday honours for distinguished service to the performing arts, particularly to ballet, as a dancer and artistic director. Li's autobiography, Mao's Last Dancer, has received numerous accolades including the Australian Book of the Year Award and has been published around the world. The children's version won the Australian Publishers Association's Book of the Year for Younger Children and the Queensland Premier's Literary Awards Children's Book Award. Mao's Last Dancer was adapted into a 2009 blockbuster feature film of the same name by director Bruce Beresford. Anne Spudvilas (Illustrator) Anne Spudvilas is one of Australia's foremost picture book illustrators and is an established artist. She divides her time between commissioned portraits, her work as a courtroom artist, and her award-winning illustrations for children's books. Her first picture book, The Race by Christobel Mattingley, won the Crichton Award for Illustration and was an Honour Book in the Children's Book Council of Australia (CBCA) Awards in 1996. Anne has produced many award-winning picture books, including Jenny Angel by Margaret Wild, winner of the CBCA Picture Book of the Year Award, 2000, and Woolvs in the Sitee by Margaret Wild, shortlisted for the CBCA Picture Book of the Year Award, 2007 and joint winner in the Children's Short Story category of the 2006 Aurealis Awards. Anne also illustrated The Peasant Prince, the picture book based on Li Cunxin's international best-selling autobiography Mao's Last Dancer - now a hugely successful motion picture. Anne rtravelled to China with Li to visit his home town of Qingdao and to meet his family, gathering valuable background material for the book. She has illustrated several chapter books in the Aussie Nibbles and Aussie Bites series and more recently collaborated with Isobelle Carmody to produce the beautiful and haunting The Night School.