Newman Prize for Chinese Literature

• Read the news release on Yan Lianke (PDF)
• Watch the 2021 Newman Prize Award Ceremony
• Read the story on the Newman Prize celebration in SIS Snapshot

Chu T’ien-wen was awarded for her short story collection Fin-de-Siecle Splendor. Rooted in the vibrant particulars of Taiwan, her short stories reveal how and why short fiction may be the genre most suited for our times. 

Chu was born in 1956 Taipei into one of Taiwan’s most prominent literary families. Her writing career began in the mid-1970s, with whimsical and sentimental pieces that led critics to dub her a latterday acolyte of Eileen Chang. Her literary stock rose steadily throughout the 1980s, boosted by the appearance of harder-hitting works such as Yanxia zhi du (City of Hot Summer, 1987), until the publication of Shijimo de huali (Fin-de-siècleSplendor) in 1990 caused it to soar rather more spectacularly. Fin-de-siècle Splendor was her breakthrough work, trading romanticism for decadence, and crafting a full-blown, mature style that melds classical grace with street slang, and bears the imprints of Taiwan’s fraught linguistic past. That style found its apotheosis in Chu’s award-winning novel Huangren shouji (Notes of a Desolate Man, 1994).

After a period of literary reclusion, Chu reinvented herself again in 2007 with Wuyan (Words of a Witch), a work which probes still more insistently into the nature of writing itself. Chu T’ien-wen’s career as a screenwriter has been no less illustrious. Her collaborations with Hou Hsiao-hsien have yielded many of the landmark films – from Beiqing chengshi (City of Sadness, 1988) through Ximeng rensheng (The Puppetmaster, 1993) to Qianxi manbo (Millennium Mambo, 2001), and several more besides — which helped to turn Taiwan’s New Cinema movement into a global brand.

Born in 1940 in Hualian on the east coast of Taiwan, Yang Mu has produced an extraordinary corpus of poetry and prose over the past five decades. After graduating from college, he earned an MFA from the University of Iowa and went on to earn a PhD in comparative literature from the University of California at Berkeley. He has taught at the University of Washington in Seattle for many years, and as a visiting professor at Princeton and National Taiwan University, among others. He has also served as the dean of humanities at National Dong Hwa University in his hometown Hualian, and as the founding director of the Institute of Literature and Philosophy at Academia Sinica, Taiwan.

Yang Mu started writing poetry in 1956 and has published 14 original books of poetry to date, most of which are gathered in the three volume Collected Works of Yang Mu. 

Born in 1953 in Hunan, south China, Han Shaogong has produced an extraordinary corpus of literary work over the past three decades. After spending six years planting rice and tea in northern Hunan during the Cultural Revolution, in the late 1970s he began a second career as a novelist. In the 1980s, he became a leading member of the “Roots-Seeking Movement” — a pioneering group of writers committed to exploring the fantastical local roots of Chinese culture, and to creating a darkly modernist type of fiction capable of articulating the macabre violence of Maoism.

A decade later, Han’s fascination with south China and with the political calamities of the 20th century culminated in his 1996 masterpiece, A Dictionary of Maqiao: a fictional biography of the village to which Han was sent down during the Cultural Revolution. He was nominated by the prominent translator and scholar Julia Lovell, whose translation of A Dictionary was published in 2003 by Columbia University Press.

Mo Yan has had a remarkable career producing a brilliant corpus of literary work. He was nominated by the prominent translator Howard Goldblatt, who also translated Mo Yan’s latest and winning novel, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out