January 2018: Wang Xiaoming 王晓明
Wang Xiaoming is the creator of numerous award-winning picture books. He graduated in 1962 with a degree in fine art, and is known for his humorous stories.
He has won China's National Book Award, the Noma Literary Prize from the UNESCO Asia-Pacific Center, and in 2004 was nominated for the Hans Christian Andersen Award, the most prestigious award in children's literature.
Bio from Candied Plums
To coincide with the launch of our translation competition, which this year is focused on children's fiction, we're delighted to feature Wang Xiaoming as our author of the month. We love his picture book The Peanut Fart《花生米样的屁》, which has been translated by one of the judges for our competition - Adam Lanphier - for Candied Plums.
We featured the book as part of this year's Institute of Education (IOE) Schools and Universities Day, on January 5th, where we ran a translation workshop - 'Translating Through Pictures'. The students, from secondary schools across the country, all joined in enthusiastically, providing their own translations of the adventures of a young snail and his peanut-shaped fart... We were really impressed with their work, and hope that many of them will enter our competition!
Candied Plums is an independent publisher of bilingual picture books, founded in 2016. In their own words - 'we want to work under an innovative and focused working environment and hope to curate the best collection of Chinese picture books for young readers all over the world.' We're very grateful to them and Adam for allowing us to reprint the story. You can read the Chinese text here and also follow this link to the illustrations with Adam's English translation, and some useful vocab! And we also have some exciting blog interviews to come soon.
If you'd like to learn more about Chinese children's fiction in translation, have a look at the wonderful blog 'Chinese Books for Young Readers'. The blog was set up by the translators and Chinese children's fiction experts Helen Wang, Anna Gustafsson Chen and Minjie Chen, who all met for the first time when they came to speak at our Children's Literature Day in 2016. It's a brilliant resource for anyone wanting to find out more about the many exciting children's books being published in translation at the moment.
And there's a lovely review of The Peanut Fart in The Picture Book Review: 'You'll never believe how much this book will make you care about a snail and his fart...'