News in the field

Newman Prize events

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Dear MCLC friends,

I hope you can mark your calendar for two events starting today!

(1) Panel Discussion, Newman Prize for Chinese Literature, Celebrating the Work of the 2025 Laureate Ling Yu
Thursday, March 27, at 12 noon (central time).

CIS Newman Panel discussion sponsored by the University of Oklahoma Institute for US-China Issues in the David L. Boren College of International Studies. The Newman Prize is awarded biennially to recognize outstanding achievement in prose or poetry that best captures the human condition, based solely on literary merit.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycsaK7dBfL4)

(2) This Friday evening (tomorrow, March 28th), we will celebrate this year’s Newman Prize for Chinese Literature Prize winner Ling Yü, and the Newman Prize for English Jueju winners starting at 7pm (central US time). Here is the live streaming link: link.ou.edu/newmanprize-livestream. Or you can watch on Youtube:

(https://www.youtube.com/live/6XlvSCIS_Bc)

I hope you can join us as we celebrate Sinophone poetry and Chinese poetics across languages!

Jonathan Stalling

Kuo-ch’ing Tu dies at 83

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Source: US-Taiwan Literature Foundation (2/21/25)
Kuo-ch’ing Tu, leading poet and scholar of Taiwanese literature, dies at 83
By Terence Russell and Lucian Tu

Official release by US-Taiwan Literature Foundation and Tu Family

Kuo-ch’ing Tu, celebrated poet and scholar of Taiwanese literature and inaugural holder of the Lai Ho and Wu Cho-liu Endowed Chair in Taiwan Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) passed away on February 21, 2025. Tu played a major role in the Modernist poetry movement in Taiwan beginning in the 1960s, and through his translations of modernist writers such as T.S. Eliot and Charles Baudelaire, he was instrumental in introducing modernist theory and practice in Taiwan. Later, during his tenure as a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, he worked tirelessly to promote awareness of Taiwanese literature on the international stage, especially through the medium of Taiwan Literature: English Translation Series, a journal that he founded in 1996.

Kuo-ch’ing Tu was born in 1941 in the Fengyuan District of Taichung City, Taiwan. After being admitted to National Taiwan University, he studied in the Department of Foreign Languages and became involved with the group of young writers who founded the literary journal, Modern Literature, a seminal publication in the introduction and popularization of modernist literature in Taiwan. In 1964, Tu and Chen Ch’ien-wu, a relative and fellow Taichung native, were among the founders of the Bamboo Hat Poetry Society, which published Bamboo Hat (Li), an influential journal devoted to modern poetry. Continue reading Kuo-ch’ing Tu dies at 83 →

Liu Jiakun wins Pritzker Prize

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Source: NYT (3/4/25)
Chinese Architect Liu Jiakun Wins Pritzker Prize
Liu, known for understated structures that respond to their surroundings, has been awarded the profession’s highest honor.
By Robin Pogrebin

A man with gray hair and a dark shirt stands in front of a brick wall.

“Liu Jiakun takes present realities and handles them to the point of offering a whole new scenario of daily life,” the Pritzker jury said in a statement. Credit…Tom Welsh for The Hyatt Foundation, via The Pritzker Architecture Prize

At 17, Liu Jiakun was sent to labor in the countryside as part of China’s “re-education” efforts during the Cultural Revolution.

“I didn’t see a clear future for me — a lot of things were quite meaningless,” Liu said through a translator (his son, Martin) in a recent phone interview from his office in Chengdu, China. “I thought at the time that life was inconsequential.”

Eventually, Liu, now 68, found meaning in architecture, a pursuit that has earned him the profession’s highest honor: the Pritzker Prize.

Having founded his own practice, Jiakun Architects, in his native Chengdu in 1999, Liu has built more than 30 projects in China — including academic buildings, cultural institutions and civic spaces. He also designed the inaugural Serpentine Pavilion Beijing in 2018 and has been featured in Venice Biennales. Continue reading Liu Jiakun wins Pritzker Prize →

Lu Xun and World Literature

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New Publication
Ma, Xiaolu and Carlos Rojas, eds. Lu Xun and World Literature. HK: Hong Kong University Press, 2025.

Abstract: In Lu Xun and World Literature, Xiaolu Ma, Carlos Rojas, and other contributors examine various aspects of Lu Xun, who is known as the father of modern Chinese literature. Essays in this book focus on Lu Xun’s works in relation to the notions of world literature and processes of literary worlding. The contributors offer detailed analyses of Lu Xun’s own literary oeuvre and of foreign works that engage with his writings. This volume also focuses on many facets of the publication and dissemination of Lu Xun’s works, from printing and binding to the discussions and debates that followed their release in China and abroad. This book not only makes an important contribution to the field of Lu Xun studies, but also proposes a reexamination of the category of world literature.

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Lu Xun, China, and the World, by Xiaolu Ma

Lu Xun, World Poetry, and Poetic Worlding: From Mara Poetry to Revolutionary Literature, by Pu Wang

The Young Lu Xun and Weltliteratur: The Making of Anthology of Short Stories from beyond the Border, by Wendong Cui Continue reading Lu Xun and World Literature →

Paper Republic newsletter no. 20

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Image description

Happy Chinese New Year!

As we usher in the Year of the Snake, this vibrant and meaningful occasion is the perfect time to celebrate the richness of Chinese culture—and what better way than through the lens of its literature?

This issue brings you a feast of publications and media showcasing the brilliance of Chinese writing in translation. From fresh releases to interviews with translators and other news, we’re thrilled to spotlight stories and voices that resonate with the spirit of this festive season. Whether you’re an avid reader or simply curious about Chinese literature, there’s plenty to explore. So, grab a cup of tea, settle in, and let’s dive into the world of Chinese storytelling together!

Read online for free

  • Yan An’s poems “Territory” and “Empty Train” (translated by Chen Du and Xisheng Chen) were published online in Flyway: Journal of Writing & Environment (Iowa State University).

Events

  • Our 9th book club on modern Chinese literature with the Open University Book Club was on 17th January. Helen Wang joined us to discuss her translation of the short story “Ying Yang Alley” (鹰扬巷) by Fan Xiaoqing (范小青). If you missed it, you can check out the recording and transcript of the event here. And keep an eye on the website as we will be doing another book club in the next few months.
  • Don’t miss this masterclass and workshop by Nicky Harman and Yan Ge on 8 March 2025 at the Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing. Writing Lives: from China in the 1930s to Britain in the 2020s. Part 1: Presentation with Nicky Harman on Ling Shuhua and Life-Writing; Part 2: Creative Writing Workshop on Characterisation, with Yan Ge. Registration link now available here.

Continue reading Paper Republic newsletter no. 20 →

The Anaconda in the Chandelier review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Jeffrey Kinkley’s review of The Anaconda in the Chandelier: Writings on China, by Perry Link. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/kinkley2/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

The Anaconda in the Chandelier:
Writings on China

By Perry Link

Reviewed by Jeffrey C. Kinkley

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright January, 2025)

Perry Link, The Anaconda in the Chandelier: Writings on China Perry Link. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2025. viii + 287 pp. ISBN 9781589881983 (paper)

Perry Link’s eminence as scholar and as public intellectual is well known to most MCLC readers. His pioneering scholarship on twentieth-century Chinese popular narratives and on the linguistic inventiveness of Chinese oral and written expression more generally is embodied in full-length monographs,[1] supplemented by studies of the circulation of Mao-era printed novels and unapproved hand-copied manuscripts, as well as essays on comedians’ dialogues (xiangsheng 相声) of the Mao and post-Mao years. Link’s 2007 essay on xiangsheng in the early People’s Republic of China (PRC) serves as a bang-up penultimate chapter for The Anaconda in the Chandelier.[2] The book prints in total thirty-one of Link’s 1998-2023 short and medium-length essays, book reviews, and prefaces, including a number of Link’s longer and more academic articles, together with their footnotes. Most are reprints—with revisions, says the preface, but changes are scarcely visible. Many of these contributions take on the dark task of explaining the finely tuned mechanics, psychology, and social psychology of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) control of Chinese communication through censorship, pre-censorship, and, above all, the creation of an unconscious, second-nature self-censorship among writers and the general public. Link calls the condition “fossilized fear.” That was the subject of a landmark monograph from Princeton University Press he published in 2000—on the “uses” of literature in China.[3] He updated the story in newsy and learned essays published in The New York Review of Books and various op-ed and human rights forums. (NYRB-related contributions make up about half of the essays anthologized in The Anaconda in the Chandelier.) The author’s expertise, Chinese friends and informants, and ever-critical yet always humanely empathetic social probings enabled what is probably now his best-known research: historical and biographical accounts of Chinese dissidence and protest. That focus, too, dates back to the 1980s, when he began to translate, edit, and publish short fiction and essays by freethinking PRC writers who surfaced, or, like Liu Binyan 刘宾雁, resurfaced, after the demise of Mao.[4] Consideration of the 1989 June Fourth massacre accelerated Link’s major collaborative academic projects and human rights activism, which includes documenting and explaining the before-and-after of China’s nationwide 1989 calamity, the Charter 08 movement, and the life story of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Liu Xiaobo 刘晓波.[5] Through it all, Link has pursued yet another vocation: teaching in and administering Chinese language programs, while coproducing textbooks for them.[6] Continue reading The Anaconda in the Chandelier review →

Ling Yü wins 2025 Newman Prize

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NORMAN, OKLA. – An international jury has selected Taiwanese poet Ling Yü 零⾬ (Wang Meiqin 王美琴) as the winner of the 2025 Newman Prize for Chinese Literature. Sponsored by the University of Oklahoma Institute for US-China Issues in the David L. Boren College of International Studies, the Newman Prize is awarded biennially to recognize outstanding achievement in prose or poetry that best captures the human condition, based solely on literary merit. Any living author writing in Chinese is eligible.

Ling Yü will receive $10,000 and an engraved bronze medallion. She will be celebrated at an award symposium and banquet to be held on the OU Norman campus during the last week of March 2025 along with the winners of the International Newman Prizes for English Jueju.

Ling Yü was nominated for the prize by Professor Cosima Bruno (School of Oriental and African Studies, London), who praised her poetry for its “untrammeled, ingenious lyricism” and its ability to weave contemporary themes and personal experiences with the controlled elegance of classical Chinese poetry.

Bruno remarked in her nomination statement:

Ling Yü’s language is economical and concise, yet surprising and reverberating with complex meaning. Her poetry engages thoughtfully with classical and modern, Eastern and Western literary, philosophical, artistic, and esoteric sources, generating outstanding works that require attention but are also intuitively grasped. Through her works, readers encounter a prism of rich, elegantly employed references that span themes of meditation, travel, feminism, capitalism, the environment, mythology and more.

Ling Yü’s extensive body of work includes nine collections of poetry, such as Series on a City (《城的連作》1990), Names Disappearing on the Map (《消失在地圖上的名字》1992), Mudong Hymns (《⽊冬詠歌集》1999), I’m Heading for You (《我正前往你》2010), and her recent collections Skin-Coloured Time (《膚⾊的時光》2018) and Daughters (《女兒》2022). Her poetry spans topics such as cultural heritage, mythological figures, ecological concern, and autobiographical reflection. Her work has been widely recognized, translated into multiple languages, and presented at major international poetry festivals, including the Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam and the Hong Kong International Poetry Nights. Continue reading Ling Yü wins 2025 Newman Prize →

Lingnan Forum on Chinese Digital Humanities

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Happy New Year! The Advanced Institute for Global Chinese Studies (AIGCS) and the Department of Chinese at Lingnan University are proud to announce the establishment of the Lingnan Forum on Chinese Digital Humanities. For details, go to the following link:

https://uofi.app.box.com/s/1j2p8obwye90n7pxcvkg0s99cj0541ty

Mission

The forum aims to promote the application of digital tools and concepts in literary and historical research, addressing the limitations of traditional methodologies. By conducting quantitative analyses of significant topics in literary studies, intellectual history, and related disciplines, it seeks to generate qualitative insights grounded in humanistic data. Additionally, the forum identifies research questions that challenge dominant theoretical frameworks in Chinese humanities, broadening the scope of academic inquiry.

Core Activities

Academic Symposia: Two international symposia will be held in the year of 2025.

Lecture Series: Delivered in a hybrid format, combining online and in-person sessions.

Research Focus

The forum focuses on major issues in literary studies and intellectual history, employing computational techniques to analyze Chinese literary corpora, including the usage and relationships of key terms. It also addresses topics beyond textual analysis, such as authors’ biographies literary networks, creative contexts, cultural environments, and the dissemination of ideas and artworks.

Posted by: Junzhe Wang <aigcs@ln.edu.hk>

Mu Cao wins Prince Claus Impact Award (2)

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The Prince Claus Fund web page on Mu Cao includes a beautiful short video on Mu Cao, made by the Fund in September 2024 and first shown during the award ceremony for this year’s Prince Claus Impact Awards: https://edu.nl/wj6y4. (The video is right below the photo at the top; the play button is not clearly visible, but it sits in the middle of the burgundy rectangle.) In the video, Mu Cao explains what writing means to him. Below the video, there’s a brief profile of the poet in English.

Crossing, a book produced by the Prince Claus Fund on the occasion of the 2024 Impact Awards, includes laudations for each of the six laureates. After Mu Cao was nominated (in 2023), the Fund approached me for information on his life and work, to support the jury as it made its way from close to two hundred nominees to six awardees. In this capacity I had the privilege of writing the laudation for Mu Cao, for which I drew on an essay I co-authored with Hongwei Bao that is forthcoming in 2025. The text of the laudation is below.

Maghiel van Crevel

MU CAO: AN INIMITABLE VOICE
In Crossing (Amsterdam: Prince Claus Fund, 2024): 96-98.

Mu Cao is a poet and fiction writer whose life and work defy social convention in every respect. He is the author of a literary oeuvre that has emerged against the odds, carried by an inimitable voice that blends indignation and imagination to address a fiercely personal experience as well as overarching issues of social justice.

Born and raised in a village in rural China, Mu Cao was expelled from school at age fifteen and has since sustained himself with precarious labor, mostly in Zhengzhou and Beijing. One of three hundred million labor migrants who have flocked from the Chinese countryside to the cities since the 1980s, he has held dozens of jobs, from assembly line worker to web salesperson and from noodle-maker to barbershop attendant. Living on a shoestring, he works in order to save money so he can quit and write. When the money runs out, he looks for work again. Continue reading Mu Cao wins Prince Claus Impact Award (2) →

Qiong Yao dies in apparent suicide

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Source: BBC News (12/4/24)
Top Chinese language novelist dies in apparent suicide
By Fan Wang, BBC News

Getty Images Chiung Yao attends a press conference on July 10, 2007 in Taipei.

Getty Images

Chiung Yao [瓊瑤], arguably the world’s most popular Chinese language romance novelist, has died in an apparent suicide.

The 86-year-old’s body was found in her home in New Taipei City on Wednesday, local media report. Emergency services said she took her own life, according to Taiwan’s Central News Agency.

Chiung Yao started writing at 18 and published more than 60 novels, many of which were adapted into movies and TV series and remained popular for decades.

She was also a successful screenwriter and producer. One of her most famous works was the TV drama My Fair Princess, which launched the careers of big name stars.

She was born Chen Che in Sichuan, China in 1938. Chiung Yao is her pen name.

A post on her Facebook account on Wednesday read: “Goodbye, my loved ones. I feel lucky that I have met and known you in this life”. It was not immediately clear if the post was published before or after her body was found. Continue reading Qiong Yao dies in apparent suicide →

Mu Cao wins Prince Claus Impact Award

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Chinese poet and fiction writer Mu Cao 墓草 (1974) has received one of the 2024 Prince Claus Impact Awards, as one of six biennial laureates in art and cultural practice worldwide (https://edu.nl/x8bjf). The Prince Claus Fund is an independent foundation dedicated to culture and development. The Impact Awards honor groundbreaking artists and cultural practitioners whose work inspires positive social change. The 2024 laureates received their awards on 3 December in the Royal Palace in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Mu Cao is known as China’s first openly gay poet. He is also one of China’s earliest migrant worker poets (aka battler poets 打工诗人) and writes with uncompromising candor on life on the underside, in his poetry and his fiction alike. Both queerness and socioeconomic inequality count as sensitive topics in China and Mu Cao has only published through unofficial channels there. An official, two-volume survey anthology of his poetry and short fiction came out in Taiwan in 2023 (https://edu.nl/fdg79). Five books of his poetry and two multiple-author anthologies produced under his editorship can be freely accessed at the Leiden University Library digital collection of unofficial poetry from China (https://edu.nl/k4d4d).

For scholarship, media, and translations on/of Mu Cao’s work, see the MCLC Resource Center bibliographies on literary studies: Author studies > M (https://u.osu.edu/mclc/h-q/#M) and Translations (author) > M (https://edu.nl/q6qc6).

Posted by: Maghiel van Crevel

Taiwan novel makes history winning National Book Award

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Source: Radio Taiwan International (11/21/24)
Taiwan novel makes history winning US National Book Award
By Amanda Ruth Stephens

Taiwan novel makes history winning US National Book Award

Taiwanese author Yang Shuang-zi’s “Taiwan Travelogue ” won the U.S. National Book Award Wednesday. In her acceptance speech reflecting on the theme of Taiwanese identity, she said, “[I] wrote about the past to move on to the future.” (Photo via YT/@NationalBook)

The English translation of the novel Taiwan Travelogue (臺灣漫遊錄) made history Wednesday as the first Taiwanese novel to win the U.S. National Book Award for Translated Literature since the award was founded in 1967. The award is among one of the most prestigious literature awards in the world, mentioned alongside the Man Booker Prize and Nobel Prize for Literature.

Written by author Yang Shuang-zi (楊双子), the book tells the story of a Japanese travel writer Chizuko, and her Taiwanese translator Chizuru traveling along Taiwan’s railway system on a “culinary journey” during the period of Japanese occupation. During the journey, Chizuko is faced with confronting the layered power dynamics in an intimate story that the New York Times praises as “a nesting-doll narrative about colonial power in its many forms[…] of translations, [and] of empires”.

The author, Yang Shuang-zi, is actually a pen name for twin sisters Yang Jo-tzu (楊若慈) and Yang Jo-hui (楊若暉) who worked as collaborators focusing on narrative creation, and historical research and translation. While Yang Jo-hui passed away in 2015, her sister has continued to use the pen name in her honor. Continue reading Taiwan novel makes history winning National Book Award →

ACCL 2024 election result

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Dear List Members,

We are delighted to announce that Professor Liang Luo has been elected as the new president of the Association of Chinese and Comparative Literature (ACCL). We extend our heartfelt gratitude to both distinguished candidates, Professor Liang Luo and Professor Ping Zhu, for their participation in this election. Special thanks go to our former presidents, Professor Nicolai Volland and Professor Carlos Rojas, for volunteering to oversee the vote counting process.

Professor Luo will assume her role as the new ACCL president in December. We warmly congratulate Professor Luo and express our sincere appreciation to Professor Zhu. As the outgoing president and program officer, we will complete the transition process by the end of December. Professor Liang Luo will lead ACCL forward for the next two years.

Finally, we thank you all again for your support of the 2024 ACCL Biennial Conference “Behold the Human” in Hong Kong!

Best regards,

Mingwei Song <msong2@wellesley.edu> and Jannis Jizhou Chen Continue reading ACCL 2024 election result →

ACCL 2024 Election

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Dear List Members,

The 2024 ACCL Biennial Conference was successfully held at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology on June 24-25, with six keynote speeches, sixty-five panels, and nearly 400 participants from Asia, Europe, Australia, and the United States. I am very grateful to the support of the HKUST faculty, students, and staff, particularly Professor Jianmei Liu and her students. My gratitude also goes to all conference participants and the audiences. The conference program can be found here.

As the current president of the ACCL, my last job is to announce that the election for the next president is now open. We have two excellent candidates. They are:

Luo Liang (University of Kentucky)
Zhu Ping (UCSD)

Their statements can be found here.

If you would like to cast your vote, please click this link, fill in the relevant information and make your choice.

​I am thankful to two former presidents, who will supervise the election and count the votes. Please cast your vote before November 10. Thank you very much!

Yours sincerely,

Mingwei Song msong2@wellesley.edu