Food delivery rider wins China's prestigious Lu Xun Literary Prize

Wang Jibing was fifty-six years old and still riding a delivery scooter through Chinese cities when the news arrived that he had won the Lu Xun Literary Prize, one of the country's most prestigious literary honours. His winning collection, Low Flight, was a book of poems—some of them written on scraps of paper between food deliveries, others composed in the margins of a life spent moving through the gig economy at ground level. The prize, named after a writer often called the father of modern Chinese literature, had never before gone to someone like him: a man who had spent decades in precarious work, who had left school as a teenager because his family could not afford to keep him there.

Wang's path to literary recognition was neither direct nor comfortable. Born in Jiangsu province, he had cycled through odd jobs for most of his adult life—construction work, scavenging for recyclables, selling goods from a street stall. Around 2019, when he was in his late forties, he became a food delivery rider. But throughout all of it, he read. And eventually, he began to write. His poems and essays started appearing on social media, gaining traction quietly at first, then with real momentum. In 2022, a poem called Man in a Hurry went viral. It had been inspired by a delivery gone wrong in 2019, when a customer's mistake with an address had sent him on hours of fruitless searching through the city. The poem resonated with something in the Chinese internet—recognition, perhaps, of a life lived under pressure, of small humiliations accumulated into something larger.

Low Flight, published in 2024, was different from his earlier collection. It was built on systematic research: Wang had interviewed and surveyed roughly two hundred delivery riders, gathering their stories and struggles. The poems that emerged from this work offered something rare in Chinese literature—an unflinching account of what it felt like to work in the country's massive gig economy, where speed is demanded, where mistakes cost money, where the work never quite stops. One line from the collection captured something of his philosophy: "Who says spreading your wings means flying high? Flying low is also flying." It was a quiet assertion of dignity in a system that often offered none.

When the prize was announced in mid-July, Wang told state media that he had held his breath, that the revelation had made him extremely nervous. The attention itself had become a burden—the media pressure, the sudden visibility, the weight of being made into a symbol. Yet he was clear about what the prize would not change. He had no intention of leaving his job. He planned to work until he turned sixty. "Financially I don't need this job to make a living," he said, "but I love the vibe of the work and it keeps me fit. I want a down-to-earth life and the award will never change who I am." The monetary value of the prize itself remained undisclosed, though historical records suggested it was worth around one hundred thousand yuan—roughly fourteen thousand dollars.

Wang's win arrived at a moment when blue-collar workers across China were beginning to claim space in the literary world. In 2023, a memoir called I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, written by former courier Hu Anyan, had become a runaway bestseller domestically and had been translated into English. Years earlier, in 2017, an autobiographical essay titled I am Fan Yusu, about a migrant worker's personal struggles, had swept across the Chinese internet with such force that the author had to temporarily leave her home to escape the endless requests for interviews and appearances. These were not isolated incidents. They were part of a pattern—working people finding their voices, telling their own stories, and discovering that those stories mattered to readers who had been waiting to hear them.

Lu Xun himself, the writer after whom the prize was named, had been a satirist and social critic, using his fiction to expose the contradictions and cruelties embedded in traditional Chinese society. His work had endured for a century, and in recent years it had found new life among younger Chinese readers. A character from one of his novels, Kong Yiji, had become an internet meme symbolizing the disillusionment of young people struggling to find stable work in a changing economy. There was a certain poetry in the fact that Wang, a man living inside that same precarity, had now won the prize bearing Lu Xun's name. His poems were doing what Lu Xun's satire had done a hundred years earlier: holding up a mirror to the pressures and contradictions of Chinese life, asking readers to see the humanity in those who were often rendered invisible.