Prof Wang Anyi 王安憶教授

Award

Doctor of Humanities, honoris causa 榮譽人文學博士

Year of Award

2025

Biography

Prof Wang Anyi is one of the very best writers in the contemporary literary scene. She began writing in the 1980s and, during her long career, has published 17 novels, The most widely acclaimed is The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, which won the 5th Mao Dun Literature Prize, the most prestigious national award for full-length novels. It was also selected as one of the 100 Best Chinese Novels of the 20th Century by Asia Weekly in 1999. 

Prof Wang has written 38 novellas, and 128 short stories as well, and is also a famous dramatic writer best-known for her cinematic adaptations of Eileen Chang’s novels: The Golden Cangue; Aloeswood Incense: The First Brazier; and Lust, Caution. The First Brazier was premiered at the 77th Venice International Film Festival in 2020. In addition to prizes for specific works, Prof Wang has received major international awards, including the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature in 2017, and was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour by the French government in 2022. Her international impact is affirmed by translations of her writing into Bulgarian, Cambodian, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Thai, and Vietnamese. 

An experienced and dedicated educator, Prof Wang held the position of full professor at Fudan University, serving as the Director of the Center for Chinese Literary Creation and Criticism from 2004 to 2024. As a visiting scholar, she has given lectures at many of the world’s most famous universities, including Columbia, Harvard, Stanford, The University of Chicago, UC Berkeley, and Yale in the US, the University of Bonn in Germany, Leiden University in the Netherlands, and Waseda University in Japan. Prof Wang’s longstanding ties with Lingnan University, and her lengthy list of visiting positions began with her six-month stay at Lingnan as writer-in-residence 20 years ago in 2005. 

Prof Wang was awarded Doctor of Humanities, honoris causa.