Welcome to our 23rd Paper Republic Newsletter, highlighting key developments from the past quarter. A notable highlight from August’s Women in Translation Month was our feature on translators Annelise Finegan and Nicky Harman and their work with women writers. Subsequently, September’s World Kid Lit Month brought celebratory news: Helen Wang’s translation of Cao Wenxuan’s Bronze and Sunflower has been selected for inclusion in Princeton University Press’s 2025 anthology, Worlds of Wonder: Celebrating the Great Classics of Children’s Literature (Princeton University Press, 2025).
You are invited to read on for more. We hope you enjoy this issue!

Events & Programs

• Join Yang Hao’s translators Nicky Harman and Michael Day in conversation with the author, exploring the transformative power of literary translation at Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation on 15 October – book your tickets here.

• Translators worldwide are now invited to apply for the “Songyang Translators’ Home” residency, immersing in a 500-year-old Chinese village to advance their translation projects amidst rich cultural heritage. Apply now.

• Don’t miss Chinese author Yao Emei in conversation with Angus Phillips at Oxford Brookes University on 6 October to discuss her newly translated story collection The Unfilial – reserve your free tickets here.

• Unpack the design philosophy behind global book covers with publishing expert Daniel Li and literary explorer Ann Morgan in this insightful session at The Huddle. Get tickets here.

Read online for free

• Read Calvin Gu’s translation of Zhang Huiwen’s 飞鸟 · 池鱼 for free.

• Read the extracted translation by Fion Tse of Lo Yu’s novel Yung Yung for free.

• Read Jack Hargreave’s translation of a conversation between Zhang Yueran and Wei Hui on Granta for free.

Reviews

• Darren Wan explores how Jeremy Tiang’s work—through his translation of Delicious Hunger and his own State of Emergency—dissolves the boundaries between history and fiction to capture the lingering atmosphere of a Cold War emergency that knew no clear beginning, end, or border. Read the full review.

• In her review of Zhang Yueran’s Women, Seated, Morgan Leigh Davies highlights how the novel exposes how precarity, wealth, and the illusion of “having it all” are universal challenges, moving beyond a purely American context to dissect gender and class in contemporary Beijing. Read the review here.

• Yau Ching’s bilingual collection for now I am sitting here growing transparent contemplates Hong Kong as a homeland through “self-translating” poems that exist in the interlingual space between Cantonese and English, masterfully rendered into an intimate English by translator Chenxin Jiang. Read the review.

• Shuang Xuetao’s Hunter, translated by Jeremy Tiang, presents a unified collection where urban realism and surreal strangeness converge to create darkly charming stories that linger with the reader. Read the review by The Guardian here.

• In Mending Bodies, Hon Lai Chu presents a dystopian tale set in a society where citizens are pressured into bodily conjoinment under a new law, exploring themes of autonomy, conformity, and the emotional cost of forced unity, all through the lens of a young university student caught in a system that threatens her identity. Read the review here.

• Translator Fion Tse reviews Ma Xiaotao’s Flesh and Blood, highlighting a novel that brilliantly explores how true family is a bond forged by choice and shared life, not just biology. Read the review here.

• Lucas Klein dissects László Krasznahorkai’s Destruction and Sorrow Beneath the Heavens, a work that blurs fiction and nonfiction to challenge Western quests for an “authentic” China. Read the review here.

• Eliot Weinberger pays elegant homage to the Tang dynasty poet Tu Fu through a “fictional autobiography” born from pandemic isolation, bridging classical Chinese tradition with contemporary creative practice. Read the review here.

Literature for Children and YA

• Cao Wenxuan’s award-winning children’s classic Bronze and Sunflower, translated by Helen Wang, has been selected for the anthology Worlds of Wonder: Celebrating the Great Classics of Children’s Literature (Princeton University Press, 2025), with a film adaptation, Qingtong & Kuihua, also scheduled for release in 2025. More information see here.

• The “Nature and Me” series, published by Phoenix Juvenile & Children’s Publishing Ltd, is an eight-book collection on biodiversity that aligns with the “Two Mountains Theory” and could serve as a valuable addition to the UN Sustainable Development Goals Book Club, with one title, The Village Has Changed, now available in the UK. To know more about the series, read here.

• From March 31 to April 3, 2025, Chinese publishers made a remarkable showing at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair through the China Shanghai International Children’s Book Fair’s dedicated pavilion, curated exhibitions of Chinese comics and illustration, and numerous rights trading events that spotlighted China's growing influence in global children’s publishing. To know more, read here.

Prizes

• The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) has announced its 2025 award shortlists, with Chinese writer Bei Dao’s poetry collection Sidetracks, translated from Chinese by Jeffrey Yang, shortlisted for the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize; and Yáng Shuāng-zǐ’s Taiwan Travelogue, translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King, shortlisted for the 2025 ALTA First Translation Prize. The winners for all awards will be announced at the ALTA48 conference awards ceremony on November 6, 2025.

• World Literature Today has announced the winners of its 2025 Student Translation Prize, with Fion Tse winning the prose category for her translation from Chinese of “Nightfall, Beyond Words,” an excerpt from Lo Yu’s novel Yung Yung.

• The results for the Carnegie Mellon University Press’s 2025 Literary Translation Prize have been announced, with a runner-up position awarded to Rock Arrangement by Chinese poet Yan An, which has been skillfully translated from Chinese by the team of Chen Du and Xisheng Chen. This Lu Xun Literary Prize-winning poetry collection will be brought to English-language readers for the first time in fall 2026.

• Xu Xiaobin’s short story “The Cure-all”—which was also featured as a Read Paper Republic story—has been awarded the 10th “Golden Short Story” prize by the literary magazine Writer.

Media

• Featuring insights from writers and translators like Xinran, Nicky Harman, and Hongwei Bao, this roundtable delves into the practice of multilingual writing, the craft of translation, and the irreplaceable human touch in literature amidst the rise of AI. Read the interview here.

• Watch the London launch of Tie Ning’s My Sister’s Red Shirt, translated by Annelise Finegan, featuring an evening conversation between the translator and China specialist Paul French.

• Watch the special celebration for Women in Translation Month featuring Chinese-English translators Annelise Finegan, translator of Tie Ning’s My Sister’s Red Shirt, and Nicky Harman, currently translating Ling Shuhua’s 1930s stories, in conversation with Georgia De Chamberet.

And that’s a wrap. See you next time!