The exiled Chinese writer Liao Yiwu, 57, is the son of schoolteachers in Sichuan Province who were persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. Mr. Liao left home at the age of 10, took a succession of jobs and eventually became involved in avant-garde poetry. In 1990, he was arrested after publicly reciting his poem “Massacre” in memory of the victims of the Tiananmen Square military crackdown on June 4, 1989, and spent four years in prison. After his release, he wrote several books under pseudonyms, all of which were banned in China but sold well on the underground market. His “Interviews With People From the Bottom Rung of Society” was published in Taiwan in 2001 and became his first book to appear in English, in 2008, as “The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories, China From the Bottom Up.” A memoir of his prison years, “For a Song and a Hundred Songs,” was published in English in 2013.

Mr. Liao remained under close watch and travel restrictions, and the police regularly searched his apartment and confiscated his manuscripts. In 2011, he made his way to Vietnam and from there to political asylum in Germany.

Mr. Liao wrote the first draft of his coming novel, “Love in the Time of Mao,” in 1993, while he was still in prison, and he revised it over the years. It tells the story of Zhuang Zigui, who is 17 at the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. He becomes a Red Guard, is among the “educated youths” sent down to work in the countryside and eventually escapes to Tibet. In an interview, Mr. Liao discussed his family’s experiences of those tumultuous years under Mao Zedong and how his novel, which is to be published later this year in Chinese and English, came about.

Q. What are your own memories of the Cultural Revolution?

A. When I was only 7 or 8 years old, I remember seeing my parents onstage at struggle sessions. One day, my elementary schoolteacher took us all to a struggle session where the last person to be dragged on stage turned out to be my mother. She was standing bent over at the waist with a big sign around her neck that said “OPPORTUNIST.”