On October 22, 2021, the second PAGEONE Literary Award held a "Literature Night" sharing activity at PAGEONE Garden Hutong Bookstore, with judges and experts such as Ge Fei, Ah Yi, Yang Qingxiang, Yang Shiyang and other judges and experts, and young writers such as Bei Kebang, Donglai, Liaojing, Yang Wanqing and other young writers attending the literary award site, chatting about literature and current life, and jointly unveiling the "Jury Award" works and "first prize" works of this year's Literary Award.
Writers pose with guests
Move from the minority to the majority, conspiring with a wider audience
Launched in the spring of 2021, the PAGEONE Literary Award was originally set up with the expectation that excellent Original Works in Chinese can be discovered more quickly, young creators and new literary forces can be encouraged and supported, and the time and distance between readers and good works can be shortened. PageONE Literary Awards are selected twice a year, divided into the first and second half of the year; there is no restriction on the type of works selected and the age of the author.
The second PAGEONE Literary Awards will be judged for Chinese simplified literary works that were first published in the first half of 2021. After several rounds of screening and review work, after the final review of the Research Center for Literary Creation and Research of Tsinghua University and the teachers of the jury, the literary appreciation team selected 5 shortlisted works from more than 4,000 original books Chinese, and finally the jury voted for the first prize works at the seminar site.
The most intuitive impression of the judges on the second PAGEONE Literary Awards is that the creators write a vivid life scene with a more open and inclusive attitude, and reach and embrace a wider audience.
Novelist A B
As a judge of this year, novelist Ah Yi believes: "This literary award is both accidental and inevitable, and we can see the author's kindness and respect for readers, and it can even be said that the author and the reader are conspiring." More and more new authors are emerging, preferring to collaborate with other art forms more than the older generation. The PAGEONE Literary Awards keenly capture this change that is taking place in Chinese literature. ”
Writer Ge fei
In his speech at the Literary Night, Ge Fei, director of the Center for Literary Creation and Research at Tsinghua University and a writer, said: "In our time, in a society where information was not very developed, we only needed to ask for knowledge, and we only needed to constantly accept new information. In today's information explosion, young writers must first analyze these experiences, this information, and sometimes even exclude the interference of information, so they face greater challenges than we did back then. I hope that the PAGEONE Literary Award can give some encouragement and support to young writers in literary creation, so that they can be more calm and determined on their own creative path, and bring us more and better works. ”
Diverse and abundant new voices, eclectic cross-border writing
Strongly conceive of the picture of the future world, sincerely tell the memory and disappearance, learn from dialects, folklore and old history, and sting contemporary cities and reality... The five shortlisted works present a diverse, abundant and fresh style.
Writer and scholar Yang Qingxiang
Judge Yang Qingxiang said: "These five works cover different writers' generations, different types of writing, and different artistic styles. In particular, it presents the heterogeneity of current Chinese writing and the possibility of boundary expansion, which is a short list of vitality. ”
The works that won the pageONE Literary Award jury are: Bei Kebang's "Sea Anemone", Liaojing's "Late Marriage", Xu Haofeng's "Poetry Eyes Tired of Heaven", Yang Wanqing's "The Returning Man".
On the night of the Literary Night, young writers Such as Bei Kebang, Donglai, Liaojing, Yang Wanqing, etc. were invited to share with the judges and editors about literary creation and current life, and collided with each other to create a spark of intellect. The authors and guests discussed the boundaries between genre literature and serious literature, the changes in science fiction writing in global writing, the dilemma of women's writing, and the breakthrough of suspense novels. Writer and director Xu Haofeng could not rush to the scene due to filming, and Ms. Tang Shiyi, the chief dancer of the China Opera and Dance Theater and a national first-class actor who participated in the film "Poetry Eyes Tired of Heaven", arrived at the scene as a special guest to share her understanding of the film and the original work.
Young writer Beckbon (second from right)
Bei Kebang's first novel, "Sea Anemone", is a story with three lines of narration, tension and suspense, with the seemingly flower-like but poisonous "sea anemone" as a metaphor, with deep insight and thick empathy, pointing directly to the subtle corners of life and people's hearts. Judge Yang Qingxiang said that even if the label of genre is torn off, the strong style and high degree of completion of this novel are still amazing. When talking about the boundary between "virtual" and "real" in suspenseful reasoning stories, Bekebang said that current affairs news materials are more just to stimulate creation at a certain point, and most of his stories rely on imagination. "Stories don't solve problems, novels are just sustenance," he says, but creation "leaves me with a chance to think about how I should face these things."
Young writer Liaojing (second from right)
In his first novel, "Late Marriage", Liaojing writes about the ups and downs of a relationship, which has the subtle thoughts of contemporary women in the face of emotional advances and retreats, and behind it is a specimen-like slice of the times in the process of urbanization. Asked why a native of Beijing can also write about the true feeling of North Drift, Liaojing laughs and says that she is actually "a Beijinger in the sense of administrative division", and that she grew up in the suburbs of Beijing, so she can resonate with the protagonist of her novel. For her, writing from a female perspective is "a process of self-discovery." Judge Yang Shiyang believes that "a young author is willing to explore the real and trivial life of the moment in such a face-to-face way, which is precious."
Special guest Tang Shiyi (second from right) received the award on behalf of Xu Haofeng
Paying attention to Xu Haofeng's creation is to pay attention to the inheritance and continuation of the once vast martial arts fever in today. Special guest Tang Shiyi mentioned that the kind of "benevolence" embodied in his works is actually very close to reality. In the recent work "Poetry Eyes Tired of Heaven", Xu Haofeng uses an ancient dragon-style assertion to tell a three-dimensional and distinctive jianghu story, as if shuttling between dreams and reality. Judge Bai Liya believes that Xu Haofeng's novel has its own unique aesthetic language, "integrating the sense of cinema, black humor, martial arts culture and Taoist Buddhist view of time and space into a complete system." Yang Shiyang believes that compared with traditional martial arts, Xu Haofeng's works push the subtle changes of people's hearts and the confusion and confusion of the characters in the big era to the front of the stage, which is its unique place.
Young writer Yang Wanqing (second from right)
Regarding Yang Wanqing's "The Returning Man", Ah Yi believes that the sci-fi-style "hunting" is not the biggest focus of the narrative, but "love and redemption". Because of this balance, Yang Wanqing's work has the same obsessive qualities as all in Blade Runner. People can see through such works what they have and what they want, that is, emotions. Talking about why he insists on science fiction writing, Yang Wanqing said that "the aesthetics created by science fiction are different from the aesthetics of daily pleasure, but a sense of strangeness, and the beauty of uncertainty that cannot be grasped", which is the place that most impressed him and the realm he strives to pursue.
The post-90s writer Donglai won the first prize
Post-90s writer Donglai won the first prize of the second PAGEONE Literary Awards with his novel collection "Year of Miracles".
In his works, Donglai exhibits several surprising and diametrically different literary styles, and his texts jump between reality and fantasy, full of adventure. Ah Yi even joked that "she will have a peak duel with Sun Pin, Zhang Huiwen and others who are the best female writers of our time" in the future, and believes that her writing is well aware of the way of virtual reality and can materialize "non-material things and materialize non-realistic things". Yang Shiyang said that Donglai was writing "the loss and search for a certain sense of meaning in life" and that "in the narrative of a flash of inspiration, it looks light, but in fact it is very heavy."
Young writer Dong Lai (center) won the first prize
Asked why she is good at creating from a male perspective, Donglai laughed, perhaps at first because of "convenience", but also related to her upbringing. "I don't have a gender stand, but I have a process of awakening." Donglai admits that in writing, she gradually found that the social dilemma in which female characters are located can provide more tension, and the dilemma itself is also worth writing. "What I recently wrote about is using women as the protagonists, and I find that the world is richer, the emotions are bigger, and for myself, the level of thinking is more." 」 When talking about her diverse style exploration, Donglai responded that she actually held the mentality of trying, trying to incorporate more things into her writing system as much as possible, but the motif that she really wanted to express was actually common.
As the first-time winner, Donglai will also receive overseas publishing opportunities in multiple languages, so as to meet readers in different regions of the world, so that the world can better understand China's past, present and future, and see the power of Chinese original literature.