China Books Review, a digital magazine published by The Wire China and Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations, is pleased to announce the winners of the inaugural Baifang Schell Book Prize.
This new book prize, with two $10,000 awards in nonfiction and translated literature categories, celebrates exceptional book-length works on or from China and the greater Sinophone world, published in English in 2024.
Award for Outstanding Nonfiction Book on China or the Sinophone World
Edward Wong has won the Nonfiction Award for his book At the Edge of Empire: A Family’s Reckoning with China (Viking, June 2024), a dual narrative that tells the story of modern China by braiding an intergenerational family memoir with first-person contemporary reporting by the New York Times former Beijing bureau chief.
The book was selected out of a wide range of nominated and submitted titles by an independent jury of five writers and scholars: Andrew Nathan (chair), Yangyang Cheng, Barbara Demick, Isabel Hilton and Jeffrey Wasserstrom. The jury commented:
“At the Edge of Empire expertly weaves together the experiences of Edward Wong’s father, as a soldier in Mao’s army and a political victim, with the story of major events in China, Hong Kong and U.S.-China relations since the early 1950s. The skillful juxtaposition of personal and national stories make a compellingly vivid two-level narrative.”
The jury awarded honorable mentions to The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age by Thomas S. Mullaney (The MIT Press, May 2024) as “a gripping technology detective story, written with verve and subtle humor”; and to Private Revolutions: Four Women Face China’s New Social Order by Yuan Yang (Viking, July 2024) for its “intimate and deeply reported portraits of four young Chinese women.”
Also shortlisted were Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food by Michelle T. King (Norton, May 2024) and The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China by Minxin Pei (Harvard University Press, February 2024).
Award for Outstanding Translated Literature from Chinese Language
Yáng Shuāng-zǐ (author) and Lin King (translator) have won the Translated Literature Award for Taiwan Travelogue: A Novel (Graywolf Press, November 2024), a bittersweet narrative of the bond between two women, nestled in an exploration of language, cuisine, history and power.
An independent jury of five authors and translators — Eric Abrahamsen (chair), Xiaolu Guo, Nicky Harman, Ha Jin and Perry Link — selected the winner from a close competition of translated titles from Chinese language. They praised the book as:
“A masterful novel that combines sly literary conceit with the lush pleasures of food writing, upended by a deepening experience of colonialism and its effects on friendship and love. Yáng Shuāng-zǐ’s narrative gifts reveal layer after layer behind what appears to be a mere travelogue, while Lin King’s artful translation allows tension to swell beneath the surface.”
The jury awarded honorable mentions to Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise: A Novel by Yi-han Lin, tr. Jenna Tang (Harper Collins, May 2024) for its “courageous portrayal of the mind of the victim in sexual predation”; and to Mourning a Breast by Xi Xi, tr. Jennifer Feeley (NYRB Classics, July 2024) as a “pioneering work of autobiographical fiction about the body and disease.”
Also shortlisted were Delicious Hunger by Hai Fan, tr. Jeremy Tiang (Tilted Axis Press, September 2024) and The Colonel and the Eunuch by Mai Jia, tr. Dylan Levi King (Bloomsbury Publishing, May 2024).
The winners for both awards will be honored in a ceremony at Asia Society in New York on June 16.
Shortlisted titles for the next Baifang Schell Book Prize, considering books published in 2025, will be announced next spring. The prize is named in honor of Liu Baifang Schell, who passed in 2021 after spending her life working to advance U.S.-China relations.
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