Contemporary Taiwanese Literature: Wu Ming-yi, Lin Yi-han, and a Quiet Reading Crisis

30-second overview: In 2018, Wu Ming-yi was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize with The Stolen Bicycle — a rare moment of international visibility for Taiwanese literature — and what he said he cared about was the "Taiwan" beside his name. In the same era, Lin Yi-han's The Unwinding of the Miracle was published in February, she passed away in April, and the "anti-predatory teacher" amendment passed its third reading in May. Chu Tien-wen, Luo Yi-chun, and Shih Shu-ching each wrote their most laborious, time-consuming long works; Huang Li-qun, Ho Ching-pin, and Li Yi-chao carried the next generation in their own quiet ways. Literary prize announcements come every year; the serious literary readership shrinks every year. This is the portrait of this era.

The Year Taiwanese Books Faced the World

In March 2018, Wu Ming-yi's name appeared on the Man Booker International Prize longlist, and the nationality field beside it read "Taiwan."¹

He said: "I am deeply honored to be included, and the nationality listed beside my name is 'Taiwan.'"¹

The nominated work was The Stolen Bicycle (單車失竊記; English translation by Darryl Sterk). The book had already won the Best Long Fiction Award at Taiwan's Golden Typesetter Literary Awards in 2015², and the English translation was done by the same Darryl Sterk who had translated Wu Ming-yi's The Man with the Compound Eyes. That earlier novel had moved even faster on the international stage: in 2014 it won the Prix du livre insulaire in France — a rare formal recognition of Taiwanese literature from the French-language literary world.³

Wu Ming-yi's international path was not built overnight. His writing has always operated along two axes: one ecological, writing about the seas, butterflies, and disappearing species of southern Taiwan; one historical, writing about World War II, ethnic trauma, a bicycle that travels through time. It is precisely these two axes that allow his work to transcend linguistic barriers — readers do not need to understand Taiwan in order to understand the loss and memory within his pages.

In the same era, Kan Yao-ming's language is harder to translate, yet earned him instant recognition in Taiwan. Sorrows of the Yellow Croaker (殺鬼, 2009) rewrites ethnic violence under Japanese colonial rule with a magical touch; Bunjia Girl (邦查女孩, 2015) explores indigenous cultural identity; both won Best Long Fiction at Taiwan's Golden Typesetter Literary Awards.⁴ What Kan creates is a hybrid language — Taiwanese Hokkien, Hakka, Japanese, and indigenous languages all intertwined. Translators would find it a headache; Taiwanese readers would recognize that it is their own voice.

The Weight of Epic: Shih Shu-ching and Luo Yi-chun

In the same decade when Wu Ming-yi and Kan Yao-ming began to show their faces internationally, two of the most ambitious projects in the history of Taiwanese literature were quietly nearing completion.

Shih Shu-ching spent seven years completing the Taiwan Trilogy: Passing Through Lo-Chin (行過洛津, 2003), Dust Before the Wind (風前塵埃, 2008), and Third Generation (三世人, 2010). The trilogy moves from a Taiwanese port during the Qing dynasty, through the Japanese colonial era, to the historical turning points of the postwar period. The question Shih keeps asking is the same: through the succession of different governing powers, who exactly is "a Taiwanese person"?⁵

Passing Through Lo-Chin is set in what is now the Kouhu area of Yunlin (Lo-Chin), and writes about Qing-era Taiwanese music and desire, and the friction between Han immigrant settlers and indigenous communities. Dust Before the Wind enters the Japanese colonial period, set against the tenure of Governor Sakuma Samata, placing the traumas of colonizer and colonized side by side. Third Generation follows the postwar political transitions, asking how the definition of "Taiwanese" was once again renegotiated. The trilogy lands in human detail: how a woman lives under different flags — with dignity or without.

Around the same time, Luo Yi-chun finished The Hotel Tainan (西夏旅館, published 2008). It is a long novel in which the extinction of the Xi Xia dynasty serves as a metaphor for the diaspora fate of second-generation mainlanders — Xi Xia is a dynasty erased from history; the mainland second generation is a generation that cannot find its footing in the cracks of an era. The Hotel Tainan won the 2009 Taiwan Golden Typesetter Award and the 33rd Golden Tripod Award; in 2010 it also took first prize at the 3rd Dream of the Red Chamber Award hosted by Hong Kong Baptist University.⁶

Both books have weight. Both require readers willing to sit down and spend time with a complex Taiwanese history.

One Book, One Law

On February 7, 2017, a book was published in Taiwan.

The Garden of Evening Mists — no. Fang Si-qi's First Love Paradise (房思琪的初戀樂園). Guerrilla Publishing. Author: Lin Yi-han. Age 26.

The book describes how a 13-year-old girl was sexually assaulted by a cram school teacher, how she became distortedly attached to her abuser through that trauma, and how she ultimately broke apart. It describes Lin Yi-han's own story.

On April 27, 2017, Lin Yi-han passed away.

On May 26, 2017, the Legislative Yuan passed the third reading of the "anti-predatory teacher amendment" (《補習班管理條例》modification): if a cram school teacher sexually assaults a student, the school's license is revoked and the teacher is permanently banned from the profession.⁷ From publication to the third reading: 108 days.

The book's sales ultimately exceeded 300,000 copies and continued to rise after her death.⁸

Lin Yi-han once wrote: "If this is happening, how can we pretend that no one in this world takes pleasure in raping little girls?" This line was extensively quoted during Taiwan's 2023 #MeToo movement.

Fang Si-qi's First Love Paradise is the heaviest example within contemporary Taiwanese literature — literature changed reality, but the price was real.

The Middle Generation: Each in Their Own Laboratory

In 2012, Huang Li-qun published the short story collection A Room by the Sea (海邊的房間; 13 stories). In the five years prior, her track record at the three major newspaper literary prizes: the China Times Short Fiction Judge's Award, the United Daily News Short Fiction Judge's Award and First Prize, and the Lin Jung-san Literary Award Short Fiction Second Prize (first prize withheld). Four times. Five years. Three major papers.⁹ Critics described her style as "a strange world that is coldly detached and aloof yet sharply penetrating" — but the prize record alone says enough.

In 2011, Ho Ching-pin published the science fiction novel Last Year in Arubar (去年在阿魯吧). The protagonist is a shut-in lost in the virtual world "Babylon." Before writing this book, Ho was diagnosed with oral cancer three years earlier, underwent surgery and chemotherapy, and then spent three years completing this novel exploring the boundary between human and machine. The book poses a question: "If a cyborg possesses equivalent substance and intelligence, is the difference between humans and machines nothing more than flesh?"¹⁰

Li Yi-chao — born 1987, a Taipei native — works as a software engineer and writes fiction on the side. His short story collection Play from Darkness (遊戲自黑暗) earned him the Lin Jung-san Literary Award and the Taipei Literature Award. Critics describe his prose as using "a dry narrative style to channel the dialectical content of physics, mathematics, and information engineering language into literature." A person who writes code has let code's logic seep into the language of fiction.

Huang Chung-kai's Ars Longa (文藝春秋, 2017) is a conceptual installation: 11 life histories, spanning Mars colonization, the Sunflower Movement scene, Green Island prison, and contemporary Taipei cafés, with a timeline stretching 150 years.¹¹ Chen Szu-hung, based in Berlin, writes in Chinese about a haunted family novel set in Yongjing, Changhua — Demon (鬼地方, published 2019, winner of the 2020 Golden Typesetter Million Award¹²); the English translation was selected for the New York Times fall reading list and has since been translated into English, Korean, Vietnamese, and Italian. Tung Wei-ko moves in the opposite direction: inward, not outward. Wang Kao (王考, 2017) takes the father-son relationship as its core, using spare, refined language to probe memory, death, and existence.

Reading Huang Chung-kai and reading Tung Wei-ko are entirely different rhythms, but both are the most angular names in this generation.

The Veterans on New Ground

Chu Tien-hsin did not stop after 2000. The Hunters (獵人們, 2005), Early Summer Love in the Time of Lotus (初夏荷花時期的愛情, 2010, winner of the 2011 Taipei International Book Exhibition Award) — she continued writing memory, the city, and the fractures left behind when the Japanese empire disappeared; later came Thirty-Three Years' Dreaming (三十三年夢), about dreams and travels in Japan.

Chu Tien-wen began writing in June 2000, finished in December 2007, and published Shaman (巫言) in February 2008. An essay-style long work, 200,000 characters, with an extraordinarily high density of prose — every page feels like summoning a sense of language on the verge of disappearing. Between 2001 and 2005 she primarily wrote scripts for Hou Hsiao-hsien (Millennium Mambo, Café Lumière, Three Times), then poured seven and a half years of accumulation entirely into Shaman.

Su Wei-chen continues writing with Tainan as her anchor: Magic Hour (魔術時刻, 2002), Tainan Reflections (倒影台南, 2004), Time Brigade (時光隊伍, 2006). Her writing is the very slow, very deep kind — time like a river; those inside it know which water this is.

All three began writing before martial law ended. After 2000 their voices did not thin — only their styles grew deeper and more personal.

The Quiet Fractures in the Literary Market

The annual grand prize for Taiwan's Golden Typesetter Literary Awards is NTD 1,000,000. Recent recipients:

Six years, six books, six authors, six ceremonies. Every year acceptance speeches, photography, coverage in cultural media.¹³

And then? First-print runs for serious Taiwanese literary fiction have mostly fallen below 3,000 copies. The Lin Jung-san Literary Award (established 2003, first prize NTD 300,000) and the Taipei Literature Award continue to incubate new voices — but getting those incubated voices in front of readers is growing harder every year.

Genre fiction has grown quickly in that gap. Giddens Ko (九把刀) started with serialized web fiction; the novel-to-film model of You Are the Apple of My Eye established a path that bypassed traditional literary institutions. Taiwanese crime fiction also took rapid shape after 2000, with writers like Jing (既晴) and Pet Master (寵物先生) confirming that Taiwanese readers will pay for genre fiction. On the science fiction side, Igelkim's The Dream-Eater (噬夢人, 2010) and Ho Ching-pin's Last Year in Arubar each tackled the boundary between humans and machines through different methods — both posing their questions more than a decade before ChatGPT appeared.

Chen Szu-hung writes from Berlin in Chinese about Yongjing, Changhua; Wu Ming-yi writes from Taichung in Chinese about the South Seas and Taiwan's coast. Their books are translated into multiple languages, appearing on international book fair displays. The readers who hear them keep growing — but how many of those readers are still on this island?

Further Reading

• Post-Martial Law Taiwanese Literature — The 1987–2000 generation of diverse explosion (political fiction, women, indigenous peoples, mother tongue), the intermediate generation in which Luo Yi-chun, Chu Tien-wen, and Chu Tien-hsin matured
• Postwar Taiwanese Literature — The 42 years from 1945 to 1987: linguistic loss, modernism, native soil debate, and women's awakening under martial law
• History of Taiwanese Literature — The overall arc from the Dutch and Spanish, through Ming-Qing, the Japanese colonial period, the postwar period, and into the present

References