Chinese delivery rider wins top Lu Xun literature prize for poetry

A food delivery rider from Kunshan, Jiangsu Province, has become the first person in his job to win the Lu Xun Literature Prize, after Wang Jibing received the 9th award for poetry for his collection Low Flight. The prize was announced on July 15, and Wang was reported to be 56 years old.

Wang’s recognition places a gig worker inside one of China’s highest literary honors, a prize long associated with established writers rather than laborers whose stories are usually told through the lens of work. His collection, also rendered as Flying Low in some reports, draws on the rhythms of delivery life, including the waits between orders, elevator trips and moments spent outside customers’ doors.

By July 2026, Wang had written more than 6,000 poems, a sharp rise from coverage in 2023 that described about 4,000 poems and noted that he had already published books of poetry. That output has made him one of the most visible blue-collar writers in the country, alongside other delivery workers and ordinary laborers whose writing has drawn public attention in recent years.

Wang has said the prize will not change who he is, and he plans to keep working as a delivery rider. That stance underscored the distance between the national prestige attached to the Lu Xun Literature Prize and the everyday routines that shaped the work it honored. His poems have emerged from a job defined by speed, pressure and constant movement, yet the award has elevated those observations into the country’s literary mainstream.

The recognition also sharpened a larger question about cultural gatekeeping in China: whether institutions are opening wider to working-class voices or simply celebrating a rare exception. Wang’s path from deliveries in Kunshan to the country’s literary elite follows earlier signs of interest in grassroots writing, including a 2023 period when his poems were already gaining notice and the body of work was growing quickly. For now, the prize has made his case unmistakable. A delivery rider who kept writing between shifts has been placed at the center of national literary recognition, and that distinction may encourage more attention to laboring lives that have long sat outside the canon.