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Helen Wang is a UK-based translator and co-founder of Chinese Books for Young Readers (2016-). She works collaboratively with Paper Republic, the Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing, World Kid Lit, and Global Literature in Libraries Initiative. She was active on Twitter: China Fiction Book Club, with Nicky Harman (2012-2025); Translated World (2013-2025).
Awards:
2017 Marsh Award for Literature in Translation for her translation of Bronze and Sunflower by Cao Wenxuan
2017 Chen Bochui Special Contribution Award, for translation and increasing visibility of Chinese children's books
2025 Shenzhen Reading Month's Translator of the Year
Other publications
The Music of Ink at the British Museum (edited volume featuring Yang Lian, Romesh Gunesekera, Denis Brown, Qu Lei Lei, Rohan de Saram, Zeng Laide and Wang Tao), Saffron Books, London, 2012. Info here
Is Gao Xingjian’s play Chezhan merely a blind worship of modern Western plays as the critic He Wen claims? How far can Chezhan be compared with Beckett’s Waiting for Godot?, Bulletin of the British Association for Chinese Studies, 1986, pp. 83-89. Available here
Interviews and short pieces
Interview, with Julie Sullivan, in Words and Pictures (SCBWI), 7 Oct 2018.
Interview, with Nanette McGuinness, in SCBWI, The Blog, 7 Sept 2017.
Interview, with Eric Abrahamsen, for Paper Republic, April 2016. in English and in Chinese
Interview, with Daniel Hahn, in Books for Keeps.
On "Bronze and Sunflower" in LARB China Blog, 13 April 2016
Translating Children's Books - a short piece for Books from Taiwan (2015)
Learning about Chinese children's books - interview with Zoe Toft for Playing by the Book, 27 April 2015
Bronze and Sunflower - Ann Morgan's Book of the Month, April 2015
Guest Interview: Helen Wang on Children's Book Translation, interviewed by Avery Fischer Udagawa for Cynthia Leitich Smith's "Cynsations" blog, 26 May 2015
Review by Nicky Harman of Bronze and Sunflower in Tribune 6 March 2015
| Small Town | by Li Jingrui | October 11, 2018 |
| Self-Portrait | by Zhang Xinxin | April 21, 2016 |
| Ying Yang Alley | by Fan Xiaoqing | April 14, 2016 |
| Sunshine in Winter | by Shi Kang tr. Michelle Deeter, Killiana Liu, Juliet Vine and Helen Wang | January 14, 2016 |
| A Second Pregnancy, 1980 | by Lu Min | November 03, 2015 |
| Xie Bomao R.I.P. | by Lu Min | October 29, 2015 |
| Crows | by Cao Wenxuan | September 24, 2015 |
| Missing | by Li Jingrui | August 06, 2015 |
The Paper Republic database exists for reference purposes only. We are not the publisher of these works, are not responsible for their contents, and cannot provide digital or paper copies.
By Helen Wang, October 22, '12
This collection of Huzhu Mongghul (Monguor, Tu) folktales, riddles, songs, and jokes features website links to audio files of the original tellers' materials for each folklore item, as well as a link to each item as retold by Limusishiden and Jugui, who collected the material in Huzhu Mongghul Autonomous County, Haidong Region, Qinghai Province, PR China, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
By Helen Wang, October 14, '12
I've just received a recommended reading list for UK Key Stage 4 students (ages 14-16 years). Among the 20th century literature there is no Chinese author (although Amy Tan is on the list). I'd like to encourage the school to add a couple of Chinese names and titles to the list. Any suggestions?
By Helen Wang, October 14, '12
New 4-part radio series here:
Martin Jacques presents a personal view on how best to understand the unique characteristics and apparent mysteries of contemporary China, its development and its possible future. In a new series of talks he sets out the building blocks for making sense of China today.
By Helen Wang, October 14, '12
Article: 'The (Bio)political Novel: Some Reflections on Frogs by Mo Yan', by Yinde Zhang, tr. by Jonathan Hall
Published in China perpectives [Online], 2012/4 | 2011, Online since 30 December 2014, connection on 14 October 2012. URL : http://chinaperspectives.revues.org/5748
By Helen Wang, October 12, '12
Posted in today's Guardian is a book dedication dated 1945. Any ideas where the quote is from?
To my darling Rose,
I once read this in a novel about Chinese life: "Success. What is it? A bubble that breaks at the touch. A shallow dream that too often ends in bitterness and despair. The only kind of success is the peace that can come from one's own heart, the ability to live with one's own self and not be ashamed, to love one good woman and with her taste life to its very dregs. That is success and the only kind worth having." Together, we shall, please God, make a success of our lives.
With all my love, Aron, November 1945, [In Hebrew] Kislev, 5706
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/oct/12/book-dedications-true-success?newsfeed=true
By Helen Wang, October 8, '12
楊牧荣获2013年美国纽曼华语文学奖
The Taiwanese poet Yang Mu (楊牧) has been chosen by an international jury as the winner of the third Newman Prize for Chinese Literature. Sponsored by the University of Oklahoma’s Institute for U.S.-China Issues, Newman Prize is awarded biennially in recognition of outstanding achievement in prose or poetry that best captures the human condition, and is conferred solely on the basis of literary merit. Any living author writing in Chinese is eligible. A jury of five distinguished literary experts nominated the five candidates last summer and selected the winner in a transparent voting process on 5 October 2012.
http://www.ou.edu/uschina/newman/winners.html
By Helen Wang, September 30, '12
Paper given at the Crafts of World Literature Conference, Oxford, 28-30 September 2012.
http://craftsofworldliterature.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/cwl-final-programme.pdf
By Helen Wang, September 20, '12
I know of at least three published this year...
By Helen Wang, September 20, '12
Chinese Aspirations in the 1980s Workshop, at the Australian Centre on China in the World, the Australian National University, 18-19 February 2013.
By Helen Wang, September 18, '12
This is the title of Chapter 7 in Diasporic Representations: Reading Chinese American Women's Fiction by Pin-Chia Feng, published by LIT Verlag Münster, 2010.
Diasporic Representations examines the stratification of various diasporic subjectivities through a close reading of fiction by Chinese American women writers of different social and class backgrounds. Deploying a strategy of “attentive reading,” Feng engages intersecting issues of historicity, spatiality, and bodily imagination from diasporic and feminist perspectives to illuminate the dynamics of deterritorialization and reterritorialization in Chinese American novels in this transnational age.
By Helen Wang, September 18, '12
By Rachel Leng
Abstract: Throughout the twentieth century, homosexuality has been and remains a highly sensitive and controversial topic in China where homosexual people were actively persecuted under Communist rule. It was not until the advent of the Internet in the mid-1990s that Comrade Literature (同志文学 tongzhi wenxue), an indigenous genre characterized by fictions of homosexuality, came into existence in China.
By Helen Wang, September 18, '12
Event sponsored by The British Council and the Oxford English Dictionary,
on Thursday 27 September, 18.30-20.30 at The Royal Society, 6 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AG.
The event will consider issues such as:
Does ‘standard English’ exist in today’s globalised society?
Who regulates the language – lexicographers, the education system, the media – or the public?
Is the language being dumbed down? And does this matter?
Should we be worried about the state of English today?
By Helen Wang, September 16, '12
Following Brigitte Duzan’s comment today, take a look at some of the excellent French websites on Chinese literature...
By Helen Wang, September 11, '12
Have you tried this? http://iwl.me/
Copy and paste something you've written or translated, then press the Analyse button, and it will suggest an author you write like. I don't know how this works (or how accurate it is), but it's quite good fun.
By Helen Wang, September 11, '12
Paper by Yang Shu (University of Oregon)
British Association of Chinese Studies (BACS) Annual Conference, 3-5 September 2012.
Full list of abstracts here
