Ni kuang

Born in Shanghai in 1935, Ni Kuang was one of eight children in a middle-class family. In his youth, he became  an avid reader who devoured Chinese classics. He very soon  became a member of the Chinese Communist Party, and worked as a prison guard. In 1957, he offended a Communist Party official, and was forced to run away, paying human traffickers to take him to Hong Kong, then a British colony, so he would be safe there.

Once in Hong Kong, Ni Kuang worked as a laborer and by chance entered a writing contest in a local newspaper. He garnered so much acclaim that he started his journey as a writer, in the wuxia genre (period action stories featuring warriors who have supernatural abilities). Throughout his life, he completed more than 300 novels. He created dozens of memorable characters, including the adventurer Wisley, the martial artist Chen Zhen, Dr. Yuen, the first modern Chinese superhero Inframan, and Fang Kang, the “one-armed swordsman” played on screen by the late Jimmy Wang.

In the mid-1960s, director Chang Cheh encouraged Ni Kuang to write the script for the wuxia film One-Armed Swordsman . He was enormously successful, leading him to become one of the most in-demand screenwriters in Hong Kong cinema. He was closely associated with Shaw Brothers Studios, writing many of his biggest hits during the studio’s golden era in the late 1960s and 1970s. Two of his films, Oriental Fury  and Karate to the Death in Bangkok , both starring Bruce Lee , particularly swept .

Ni Kuang received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2012 Hong Kong Film Awards.