Abstract: The pre-failure evolution of landslides is of great value for the analysis of landslide triggering factors and post-disaster stability assessment. At present, optical images are commonly employed to analyze the pre-failure evolution, but it is well-known that their data availability could be highly limited due to the presence of clouds. With the advance in radar remote sensing and interferometric synthetic aperture radar(InSAR), it could provide a new technical approach for landslide pre-failure detection. In this paper, the 2018 Nanyu landslide in Gansu Province is utilized to demonstrate the capability of InSAR to trace its pre-failure surface displacements using European Space Agency's Sentinel-1 radar data with a temporal interval of 12 days in different tracks. The results show that the landslide began to deform in June of 2017, and the maximum cumulative deformation reached up to 77 mm in the 13 months before the occurrence of the landslide. The time series InSAR derive displacements and the rainfall data is consistent, suggesting that the rainfall should be one of the triggering factors for the landslide. The study demonstrates the potential of radar interferometry for landslide detection, which can provide insights on landslide triggering factors, landslide disaster prevention and mitigation, and even landslide monitoring and early warning work in the future.