A new edition of the phenomenal international bestseller
From bitter poverty to the stardom of the West - this is the
extraordinary true story of one boy's great courage and
determination.
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.
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