We are excited to announce the Finalists for the 2027 Newman Prize for Chinese Literature!
The University of Oklahoma Institute for US-China Issues has announced five finalists for the 2027 Newman Prize for Chinese Literature, one of the leading international awards devoted exclusively to Chinese-language literature.
The five finalists for the 2027 prize are:
Fang Fang 方方: Nominated by Michael Berry, University of California, Los Angeles
Su Tong 苏童: Nominated by Wang Yao 王尧, Soochow University
Wu Ming-Yi 吳明益: Nominated by Darryl Sterk 石岱崙, Lingnan University
Priest: Nominated by Heather Inwood, University of Cambridge
Zhang Yueran 张悦然: Nominated by Dylan Levi King
Sponsored by the Institute for US-China Issues in the David L. Boren School of International Studies in the Dodge family College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oklahoma, the Newman Prize is awarded biennially in recognition of outstanding achievement in Chinese-language literature that illuminates the human condition. The prize is conferred solely on the basis of literary merit and is open to any living author writing in Chinese. The winner receives $10,000 and is invited to the University of Oklahoma for the Newman Prize award ceremony and associated academic events along with the local winners (and virtually, global) winners of the Newman Prize for English Jueju.
More About this Year's Newman Prize Nominees.
Fang Fang 方方 is one of contemporary China’s most prominent writers, having built a career spanning nearly five decades and encompassing novels, novellas, short stories, essays, and works of cultural history. Her writing repeatedly confronts historical memory, social inequality, the experiences of women, and the moral responsibilities of the writer. Major works include The Scenery, Soft Burial, The Running Flame, The Walls of Wuchang, and Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City. Fang Fang was nominated by Michael Berry, Professor of Contemporary Chinese Cultural Studies and Director of the Center for Chinese Studies at UCLA, who has also translated several of her works into English.
Su Tong 苏童 is one of the most internationally recognized figures in contemporary Chinese fiction and has spent more than four decades exploring history, memory, desire, fate, and the moral complexity of human relationships. His major works include Wives and Concubines, adapted by Zhang Yimou as the internationally acclaimed film Raise the Red Lantern, as well as Rice, My Life as Emperor, Binu and the Great Wall, The Boat to Redemption, and The Sparrow’s Trap. A recipient of the Mao Dun Literature Prize and the Man Asian Literary Prize, Su Tong is currently a Professor at Beijing Normal University. He was nominated by Wang Yao, Professor of Chinese Literature at Soochow University, a leading scholar and critic of modern and contemporary Chinese literature.
Wu Ming-Yi 吳明益 is a prominent Taiwanese novelist, essayist, artist, and nature writer and serves as Professor in the Department of Sinophone Literatures at National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan. His fiction brings ecological consciousness, natural history, colonial memory, and the multilingual experience of Taiwan into conversation with global questions of technology, environmental change, and human relationships with the nonhuman world. His major novels include The Man with the Compound Eyes, The Stolen Bicycle, and his most recent novel, The Sea Breeze Club 《海風酒店》. Wu was nominated by his translator Darryl Sterk, Associate Professor in the Department of Translation at Lingnan University in Hong Kong.
Priest, known only by her pen name, is an extraordinarily prolific Chinese internet novelist who has published more than 30 works of fiction since beginning her career on Jinjiang Literature City in 2007. Her writing moves across danmei, science fiction, crime, fantasy, martial arts, historical fiction, and contemporary urban fiction, combining popular storytelling with philosophical and ethical questions. Her best-known works include Silent Reading 《默读》, Guardian 《镇魂》, Stars of Chaos 《杀破狼》, and The Defectives 《残次品》, many of which have reached international audiences through translation and adaptation. Priest was nominated by Heather Inwood, Associate Professor in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge.
Zhang Yueran 张悦然 emerged as one of the defining literary voices of China’s post-1980 generation and has subsequently developed into a major novelist whose work bridges generational experience with broader questions of memory, class, family, and historical trauma. Her works include The Distance of Cherries, Cocoon 《茧》, and Women, Seated 《天鹅旅馆》. Zhang is an Associate Professor in the School of Literature at Renmin University of China, and she was nominated by Dylan Levi King, a writer and translator of contemporary Chinese literature based in Tokyo.
The five finalists will now be considered by the international jury through the Newman Prize’s distinctive transparent voting process. Jurors vote through successive rounds of positive elimination, narrowing the field until a single candidate remains. The jury is scheduled to convene in late October 2026 to select the 2027 Newman laureate.
About the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature
Established through the generosity of Harold J. and Ruth Newman, the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature is administered by the University of Oklahoma’s Institute for US-China Issues. The Newmans’ endowment for a chair at OU helped make possible the creation of the Institute and its programs promoting deeper cultural understanding between the United States and the Chinese-speaking world. Since its establishment, the Newman Prize has recognized many of the most significant voices in contemporary Chinese-language literature. Past laureates include Mo Yan, who subsequently received the Nobel Prize in Literature, as well as Han Shaogong, Yang Mu, Chu T’ien-wen, Wang Anyi, Xi Xi, Yan Lianke, Chang Kuei-hsing, and Ling Yü. Through the Newman Prize, the Chinese Literature Translation Archive, Chinese Literature and Thought Today, and related literary and cultural initiatives, the University of Oklahoma has become an important international center for the study, translation, and celebration of Chinese literature.
