Wang Jibing, a 56-year-old delivery rider from China's Jiangsu province, has won the poetry prize at the ninth edition of the Lu Xun Literature Prize, one of China's most prestigious literary honours. The collection he won with is titled Low-altitude flight and was published in 2024.
Wang has been writing since 1988, but to make a living he worked construction, operated a dredger, sold goods on the street and collected scrap materials. In 2019, at fifty, he registered as a delivery rider: he was the oldest at his station. Since then he has written thousands of poems during the waits outside restaurants, at lifts, at traffic lights, or between one delivery and the next, jotting them down on his phone, on scraps of paper, and even on the palm of his hand.
Low-altitude flight, however, is not just the poetic diary of a courier. To write it, Wang interviewed more than 140 riders and distributed around sixty questionnaires, trying to tell the stories of those who deliver food without the time or the tools to tell their own. His goal, he explained, was to narrow the distance between customers and the workers who appear for a few seconds at their doors.
The prize thus brings the language of the gig economy into the Chinese literary canon: the races against the clock, the customer reviews, the waiting, the fear of arriving late. Wang has said the recognition won't change who he is. He will keep writing and, at least for now, keep delivering food.
