Professor Wang Yao wins the 7th LuXun Literature Prize

The Seventh Lu Xun Literature Prize announced its final winners for 2014-17 in Beijing on Aug 11. Professor Wang Yao of Soochow University won the Literary Theory Review Award for his work Rereading Wang Zengqi and Discussing Contemporary Literature Related Issues. He is the 4th professor of Soochow University who is awarded this honor after Wu Yiqin, Fan Xiaoqing, and Lu Shuyuan.

For many years, Professor Wang Yao has mainly engaged in the study of modern and contemporary Chinese literature and ideology and culture. His fields lie between the study of literary history and literary criticism. His academic works include AsAMatter of the 1980s, History of Chinese Contemporary Prose, The Rhetoric of “Thoughts Events”, Dialogue between Mo Yan and Wang Yao and so on. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of several book collections including ChineseContemporary Literary Criticism, New Humanity Dialogues, and the Translation of Overseas Chinese Modern Literature Research, etc. His publications include Lost Space and Time, Review classics, Putting off the Cultural Coat, and so on. He won the Chinese Literature and Media Award, the Zijinshan Literature Award of Jiangsu Province and after being awarded as “Yangtze River” Scholar Professor by the Ministry of Education of China in 2013-2014, he is now awarded Luxun Literature Prize.

Since the mid-1980s, Professor Wang Yao has been studying the history of modern literature and works of Wang Zengqi, etc. After recent years of reflecting the concurrent situation of contemporary literature, he decided to reread Wang Zengqi’s works. He holds that Wang Zengqi is a well-known writer and critics have made abundant outstanding achievements in studying him and his works. But according to my own reading and researching, there is still more room for interpreting his works. The purpose of rereading is to make new explanation for better understanding of Wang Zengqi and his works, says Professor Wang Yao. After two years of preparation, he at last completed this literature theoretical review which was later published in the 12th issue of Literature and Art Contention in 2017.

Mr. Wang Zheng, the famous critic and the vice president of the Writers’ Association of Jiangsu province, commented that Wang Yao is a front-line literature critic whose essay Rereading Wang Zengqi and Discussing Contemporary Literature Related Issues is quite a model of literary criticism. He started from an accurate cutting point by rereading Wang Zengqi, a classical writer worth of being reread, to discuss the related modern literary issues, which is profound.

It is understood that the Lu Xun Literature Prize, one of China’s top four literary prizes, is held by Chinese Writers Association to reward outstanding novels, short stories, reportages, poems, essays and literary criticism, and literary translation. The prize is awarded every four years and has been held for seven times, which has promoted the flourishing of Chinese literary greatly.