From an early coup to Peppa Pig, Michelle Obama and Harry Potter, ex-Penguin China chief

Jo Lusby got Penguin to bet US$100,000 on a Chinese dissident’s novel, and never looked back. Now she’s handling rights to a sci-fi hit

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Literary agent Jo Lusby. She handled everything from dissident novel Wolf Totem to Peppa Pig for Penguin China, before setting up as a consultant in Hong Kong. Photo: Jonathan Wong

Published: 7:45am, 30 Jun 2024Updated: 9:20am, 30 Jun 2024

When newly appointed Penguin China general manager Jo Lusby hosted her international bosses in Beijing for the first time, in 2005, she suggested the publishing executives meet the author of a then-bestselling book, Wolf Totem.

On the face of it, a Chinese-language novel about wolves and shepherds written by a pseudonymous Beijing intellectual seemed unlikely to captivate an international audience.

But the writer, Jiang Rong, charmed the executives with his atmospheric descriptions, based loosely on his time spent on the Inner Mongolian grasslands working with nomadic shepherds and observing the behaviour of wolves.

It was generally regarded as an allegorical work, and a thinly disguised criticism of the Cultural Revolution, which lasted from 1966-1976, a period that saw millions of people sent to work in the Chinese countryside, deprived of formal education.

Lusby in 2008 during her days working at Penguin China. Photo: Ben McMillan

Jiang, who was jailed twice – for his involvement in the Democracy Wall movement of 1979 and taking part in the Tiananmen Square demonstrations 10 years later – was fully aware that the subject matter was highly controversial and that the book’s 2004 publication, originally in Chinese, could potentially land him in trouble.

Political undertones aside, it is a ripping yarn that hooks the reader from the first page with its thrilling account of wolves chasing their prey. The Penguin executives made a bid for the book there and then, putting forward US-dollar figures that left Lusby wide-eyed.