The 9th Bai Meigui Translation Competition: Liang Hong 梁鸿

The results of the 9th Bai Meigui Translation Competition are in!

We're delighted to announce that the winners of the 9th Bai Meigui Translation Competition, translating a text by Liang Hong 梁鸿, are:

1st place - Andrew Rule

Runners-up (in no particular order):

Hannah Lund

Yuyun Lou

Didi Wu

Hai Ning Ng

Will Osborn

Bill Leverett

Many congratulations to our winners! Andrew Rule will win a bursary to attend the online 'Bristol Translates' Literary Translation Summer School, and the winning translations will be published shortly on our website. While we are unable to provide feedback on individual entrants, our judges have kindly provided some general comments below.

Comments from the judging panel:

We were very impressed by the standard of the entrants. This was a challenging piece to translate, with its range of language from text message-speak to vignettes of the landscape, and the translations we received all had some great translation choices. The group we shortlisted were extremely competent efforts. But the one that stood out as being quite exceptional, which we have chosen as the winner, was a pleasure to read, with lively dialogue and expressive descriptions. This translation has a practised, professional quality and it is our pleasure to promote such high-quality work.

Very many thanks to our judges, Nicky Harman, Shen Yang, and Michael Day, for their generosity and enthusiasm.

You can read the competition text here, and find the winning entry on our Bookclub page, as part of our feature on Liang Hong. The shortlisted entries can all be found in the menu to the left of this page. We hope you enjoy discovering the different approaches taken by the winner and all our shortlisted translators!

***********************************************************************************************************************************************

Information about our latest competition

Our text this year is an extract from a work by renowned author Liang Hong 梁鸿, and we'd like to thank the author for generously allowing us to use her writing for this competition. We're very happy to be partnering with Sinoist Books this year, with generous support from Arts Council England.

The competition text to be translated is around 1000 characters in length, but we've provided the whole piece for you to read as well. If you go to our Competition Text page, you can find the selected and full text.

The Prize

The winner of this year's competition will receive a bursary to attend the 2024 'Bristol Translates' Literary Translation Summer School (which will be online, dates TBC). The tutors for the Chinese-English translation workshops will be one of our judges, Nicky Harman (who has been a long-term supporter of our Centre, and was one of the judges for our very first competition in 2015!), and Jack Hargreaves. The winning entry and runners-up will also be published on our website.

The Judges

We're honoured to have a panel of renowned translators and writers to judge the competition.

Nicky Harman lives in the UK and translates full-time from Chinese, focussing on fiction, literary non-fiction, and occasionally poetry. She also works on Paper-Republic.org, a non-profit website promoting Chinese literature in translation, as a volunteer and a Trustee. She was co-Chair of the Translators Association (Society of Authors, UK) from 2014 to 2017, and blogs on Asian Books Blog.

Born on the 1st of January, 1986, in Shandong, Shen Yang is the author of More Than One Child, where she recounts her turbulent upbringing as an excess-born child during the One Child Policy era. With More Than One Child serving as a farewell to both her childhood and an era, Shen Yang’s debut illustration book, Golden Childhood, is a vibrant celebration of her fondest memories in the idyllic countryside. Having graduated in English, Shen Yang studied script writing at Beijing Film Academy, and has also written opinion pieces for The Telegraph and South China Morning Post. You can find out more about her latest works at shenyangyang.com.

Michael Day is a traveler, writer, and translator who lives in Los Angeles and Mexico City. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books: China Channel, Georgia Review, Words Without Borders, Pathlight, and Massachusetts Review, among other publications. His awards include the 2015 Bai Meigui Translation Prize (joint winner with Natascha Bruce) and the 2020 Jules Chametzky Translation Prize, and he holds a master's degree in East Asian Languages and Cultures from the University of Southern California. He is co-translator, with Nicky Harman, of Diablo’s Boys by Yang Hao, forthcoming from Balestier Press.

How to Enter

The competition deadline is midnight (GMT) on December 18th, 2023.

Please send your entries as an email (MSWord) attachment to writingchinese@leeds.ac.uk.

In the body of the email please include your name, contact details. We’d also be interested to know your current country of residence, what you consider to be your first language, and whether you have had any translations published previously. This information will NOT be available in any form to the judging panel, but is useful for our records, and planning purposes for future competitions. (The only information that you must include in order to submit, is your name/contact details).

Please do not include your name/any identifying information in the attachment.

The winner will be announced in early spring 2024.

Please note that we will not normally be able to provide feedback on entries, but thank you, in advance, for your submission.

Good luck!