UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA | NEWMAN PRIZE FOR CHINESE LITERATURE
Fang Fang 方方 Named 2027 Newman Prize for Chinese Literature Laureate
NORMAN, Okla. Monday, Oct. 26.
Fang Fang (方方), one of contemporary China’s most prominent writers, has been named the 2027 Newman Prize for Chinese Literature laureate. Across nearly five decades of novels, novellas, short stories, essays, and cultural history, she has confronted historical memory, inequality, women’s experiences, and the moral responsibilities of the writer. The award honors outstanding achievement in Chinese-language literature on the sole criterion of literary merit. The 2027 international jury spanned the globe and selected Fang Fang through a multi-round voting process of positive elimination. Her major works include The Scenery, Soft Burial, The Running Flame, The Walls of Wuchang, and Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City and each probes the human costs of political and social upheaval, restoring individual experience to the center of collective history.
This year’s nominees included Su Tong 苏童, one of China's most celebrated contemporary novelists, nominated by Wang Yao 王尧, Professor of Chinese Literature at Soochow University in China and a prominent scholar and critic of modern and contemporary Chinese literature; Wu Ming-Yi 吳明益, the acclaimed Taiwanese novelist known for his ecological imagination and explorations of humanity's relationship with the natural world, nominated by Darryl Sterk 石岱崙, Associate Professor in the Department of Translation at Lingnan University in Hong Kong and a distinguished translator of Sinophone literature; Zhang Yueran 张悦然, one of the defining literary voices of China's post-1980 generation, nominated by Dylan Levi King, a Tokyo-based writer, translator, and literary critic specializing in contemporary Chinese literature; and priest, the popular Chinese internet novelist best known for her danmei (“Boys' Love”) fiction, nominated by Heather Inwood, Associate Professor in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. Priest's nomination marked the first time an author associated with Chinese internet literature had been nominated for the Newman Prize, a fact that propelled news of her nomination to the second most-shared topic across Chinese social media in the hours following the announcement.
This year's winner, Fang Fang, was nominated by Michael Berry, Professor of Contemporary Chinese Cultural Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the English-language translator of several of her works. Reflecting on Fang Fang's long literary career Professor Berry writes, “Running through her work is a deep commitment to shine a light on the inequalities and injustices faced by women in modern China and to reveal the traumatic scars of modern Chinese history, which she brings to life through her remarkable gifts as a storyteller.” Reflecting on this year’s winner, Jonathan Stalling, Director of the Newman Prizes, writes that “Fang Fang reminds us that literature is not simply a means of remembering the world, but of bearing witness to the way in which it unfolds in the lives around us. Across nearly five decades, her writing has brought extraordinary sensitivity to the experience of ordinary people, to the wounds of history, and to the courage required to tell stories that might otherwise remain untold. The Newman Prize recognizes writers whose work upholds the highest levels of literary achievement and deepens our understanding of the human condition, and Fang Fang's writing exemplifies that commitment.”
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, held in conjunction with celebrations of local and global winners of the Newman Prize for English Jueju (www.juejupath.com). This year’s ceremony will be held on April 8-9, 2027.
Established through the generosity of Harold J. and Ruth Newman, the prize is administered by the University of Oklahoma’s Institute for US-China Issues. Their endowment for a chair at OU helped make possible the Institute and its programs advancing cultural understanding between the United States and the Chinese-speaking world.
Past Newman Prize 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. Alongside the prize, the Chinese Literature Translation Archive and Chinese Literature and Thought Today advance the study, translation, and celebration of Chinese-language literature.
Media contact: Jonathan Stalling, stalling@ou.edu
