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

Wang Jibing was making a delivery somewhere in China when he learned he had won one of the country's most prestigious literary awards. The news arrived in mid-July, and with it came a flood of attention that left him breathless. He told state media he felt extremely nervous in the moment of revelation—the kind of nervous that comes when a private life suddenly becomes public property.

His winning collection, Low Flight, is a slim book of poems. Some were written on scraps of paper between deliveries, jotted down in the margins of a life lived at speed. Others came later, shaped from conversations with roughly two hundred other riders—people who, like him, navigate the relentless mathematics of the gig economy: distance divided by time, hunger divided by urgency, the constant pressure to move faster than the previous day.

The Lu Xun Literary Prize carries weight in China. It is named after a writer considered the father of modern Chinese literature, and it is not given lightly. The monetary award itself remains undisclosed, though in 2014 it was valued at around 100,000 yuan—roughly $14,800. But the real prize is recognition, the validation that what you have written matters, that your voice deserves to be heard beyond the algorithm that usually decides who reads what.

Wang's path to this moment was not straightforward. Born in Jiangsu province, he left school as a teenager because his family could not afford to keep him there. He worked construction, scavenged for waste, sold things from a street stall. Eventually he became a delivery rider, a job that would define his adult life and, unexpectedly, his literary career. Throughout all of it, he read. Over the past decade, he began posting his own poems and essays online, building an audience one post at a time.

In 2022, one of his poems went viral. It was called Man in a Hurry, and it was born from a real incident three years earlier: a customer had entered the wrong address, and Wang spent hours trying to complete the delivery, caught in the gap between what was promised and what was possible. The poem resonated because it captured something true about the work—the way small mistakes become large frustrations, the way a rider's time is never entirely their own.

Low Flight, published in 2024, draws directly from these conversations with other riders. One line from the collection has become something of a manifesto: "Who says spreading your wings means flying high? Flying low is also flying." It is a quiet assertion of dignity, a refusal to accept that a life lived close to the ground is a life lived poorly.

When asked if he would quit now that he had won, Wang said no. He plans to work until he is sixty. The award will not change him, he insisted—he wants a down-to-earth life, and the work itself keeps him fit, keeps him connected to the world he writes about. Financially, he does not need the job. But he needs it in other ways, the ways that matter most to a writer: as material, as witness, as proof that his life is worth examining.

Wang is not alone in this moment. Across China, blue-collar workers are increasingly stepping into the literary spotlight. In 2023, a memoir called I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, written by a former courier named Hu Anyan, became a runaway bestseller and was later translated into English. In 2017, an autobiographical essay titled I am Fan Yusu, about a migrant worker's personal struggles, swept across the Chinese internet with such force that the author had to leave her home temporarily, overwhelmed by media requests. These are not isolated incidents. They are part of a pattern, a growing recognition that the people who move goods and services through the economy have stories worth telling, perspectives worth hearing. Wang Jibing's prize is one more signal that this conversation is only beginning.