Awards Ceremony for the 2024 Winners

This week, at Asia Society in New York, we were delighted to host the winners of the inaugural Baifang Schell Book Prize to celebrate their exemplary work. This new book prize, with two $10,000 awards in nonfiction and translated literature categories, recognizes exceptional books on or from China and the greater Sinophone world. In its first year, two independent juries considered scores of English-language titles published in 2024 to come up with the shortlists for nonfiction and fiction, before deciding the winners.

Edward Wong won the Award for Outstanding Nonfiction Book on China or the Sinophone World for his book At the Edge of Empire: A Family’s Reckoning with China (Viking, June 2024). In a discussion moderated by jury chair Andrew J. Nathan, Wong reflected on his father’s life serving as a soldier on peripheries of Mao’s China, and his own journey as a reporter covering the nation decades later. Yáng Shuāng-zǐ (author) and Lin King (translator) won the Award for Outstanding Translated Literature from Chinese Language for Taiwan Travelogue: A Novel (Graywolf Press, November 2024). Following a video address by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, Lin King talked to jury member Yangyang Cheng about myriad Taiwanese identities, the legacy of colonialism, and the art of translating across multiple languages.

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. The ceremony included a photo-montage tribute, and was followed by a reception. Submissions for next year’s awards, considering books published in 2025, will open in November with the shortlisted titles announced next spring. Watch a video of the ceremony below:

I think all of us who ask questions of our parents wonder whether their memories are accurate depictions of what they have lived through.
Edward Wong

Speakers

Edward Wong is a diplomatic correspondent for The New York Times, where he was formerly Beijing bureau chief, and author of At the Edge of Empire (2024). He was awarded the Livingston Prize for his war correspondence from Iraq, and was on a team that was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the war.

Lin King is a writer and translator from Taipei, Taiwan. Her translation of Taiwan Travelogue: A Novel won the 2024 National Book Award for Translated Literature. Her fiction has appeared in One Story, Boston Review and Joyland, among others, and she received the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers.

Andrew J. Nathan is Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. He studies the politics and foreign policy of China, political participation and political culture in Asia, and the international human rights regime. Nathan’s books include Chinese Democracy (1985), The Tiananmen Papers (2001) and China’s Search for Security (2012).

Yangyang Cheng is a Research Scholar at the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale University, where her work focuses on the history of science in China and U.S.-China relations. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian and The Nation, and she has received several awards for her writing. Born and raised in China, and trained as a particle physicist, she worked on the Large Hadron Collider for over a decade.