An international jury has selected Chu T’ien-wen (朱天文) as the winner of the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature. Sponsored by the University of Oklahoma’s Institute for US-China
Issues, the Newman Prize is awarded biennially in recognition of outstanding
achievement in prose or poetry that best captures the human condition, and is
conferred solely on the basis of literary merit. Any living author writing in
Chinese is eligible. A jury of five literary experts nominated the five
candidates last spring and selected the winner on September 17. Chu T’ien-wen
is the first ever female laureate.
Next March,
Chu will receive USD $10,000, a commemorative plaque, and a bronze medallion at
an award ceremony at the University of Oklahoma. The event will be hosted by
Peter Hays Gries, director of the Institute for US-China Issues. “All five
nominees are exceptionally talented and accomplished writers.” He said. “It is
a testament to Chu T’ien-wen’s remarkable literary skills that she emerged the
winner after four rounds of positive elimination voting.”
This
year’s Newman nominees represented some of the most respected names in Chinese literature.
As well as Chu T’ien-wen, from Taiwan, they included from mainland China Yan
Lianke, Yu Hua, and Ge Fei, and from Malaysia Chang Kui-hsing.
Yan
Lianke (阎连科) was a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize and
has won numerous awards in China and in Europe. He is known as much for his formal innovations as for his social commentary. Yu Hua (余华) is one of China’s most well-known novelists, garnering
both critical and popular acclaim - his novel To
Live was adapted into a film.
Once known as a member of the avant-garde, Ge Fei (格非) now writes lyrical novels that have won him many
fans. Chang Kui-hsing (張貴興) sets his novels in South-East Asia, and is crafting one
of the most distinctive bodies of work in world literature.
Meanwhile Chu T’ien-wen writes short stories rooted in Taiwan. In 1990
she published Shijimo de huali (Fin-de-siècle Splendour) which pays
homage to her home town, Taipei, over eight fluidly inter-connected but
stand-alone tales. She followed up with Huangren shouji (Notes
of a Desolate Man), whose gay narrator talks with thinkers, writers, and
philosophers in a text which mingles story and metaphysical rumination. After a period of literary reclusion, Chu reinvented
herself in 2007 with Wuyan (Words of a Witch), which probes the nature of writing. Chu
T’ien-wen’s career as a screenwriter has been no less illustrious. She has
collaborated often with Hou Hsiao-hsien, in a partnership yielding many of the films
which helped turn Taiwan’s New Cinema movement into a global brand – Beiqing
chengshi (City of Sadness), Ximeng rensheng (The
Puppet Master), Qianxi manbo (Millennium
Mambo), and others.
Chu T’ien-wen was nominated for the Newman Prize by Margaret
Hillenbrand, Associate Professor of Modern Chinese at Oxford University. “Chu
T’ien-wen is a multi-faceted cultural figure,” Said Hillenbrand, “a novelist,
screenwriter, and essayist who excels at each of those different forms. But in
recommending Chu’s short-story collection Fin-de-siècle Splendour for the Newman Prize, I was calling
particular attention to the place she occupies in modern Chinese literature as
a superb practitioner of short fiction, arguably that literature’s most
triumphant genre. As any attentive reader of literature from China, Taiwan,
Hong Kong and the diaspora over the last century can testify, the history of
this literature is, to a degree perhaps unparalleled elsewhere, one shaped,
driven, and dictated by brilliant short stories. And as a writer of short
fiction, Chu is prodigiously talented. Texture, fragrance, colour, and taste
leap out from her uncommonly crafted prose with such force that they suck the
reader into the text in ways not usually associated with the short-story form –
a genre which is supposedly too fleeting to be immersive. Chu T’ien-wen’s
writing refutes this received wisdom. She has such a flair for carving
crystal-cut literary moments, in which the constituent elements of a scene –
air, light, mood, character – are each summoned up so precisely that they
coalesce into a tableau that sears itself on the reader’s eye.”
