All prizes China
茅盾文学奖
China · Since 1982 · For books in Chinese
Awarded every four years by the China Writers Association to several novels of at least 130,000 characters by Chinese writers, published in mainland China in the period under review. The year is the year an edition was announced. The nominees are the final-round list: about 25 books in 2005 and 2008, ten from 2011; the 2000 edition published winners only.
The novelist Mao Dun left 250,000 yuan of his royalties to the Chinese Writers Association in 1981 to reward the best novels, and the prize named after him was first awarded in 1982. It is open to novels of at least 130,000 characters by Chinese citizens, published in mainland China during the period under review. A jury appointed by the association votes in several rounds, and a book needs two thirds of the votes to win, so each edition has between three and five winners. The prize was first given every three years and later every four. Before the final vote the list of nominated finalists is made public so that readers can send their views to the jury, and since 2011 the jurors' votes have been published under their names.
Mao Dun 2023 · Nominee
Yanshi ji
Title translated by AI:“A Record of Feasts”
Ge Liang · 44 when first published
Novel · Historical
AI-generated summary:When word spreads that a century-old Cantonese restaurant will close, its old staff rally to save it, and its retired head chef explains why, opening a story of master and apprentice across a century.
Mao Dun 2023 · Nominee
Yousheng
Title translated by AI:“The Living”
Novel · Historical, Family
AI-generated summary:Over a single day and night, a village midwife known as Great-Grandmother, who has delivered more than twelve thousand babies, tells a story that reaches from the late Qing dynasty to the present.
Mao Dun 2023 · Nominee
Jinse heliu
Title translated by AI:“Golden River”
Lu Min · 49 when first published
Novel · Family
AI-generated summary:In his last two years, a private entrepreneur who made his first fortune early in China's reform era looks back on his life, and on the betrayal that gave him his start.
Mao Dun 2023 · Nominee
Yanxia li
Title translated by AI:“Amid Mist and Clouds”
Wei Wei · 52 when first published
Novel
AI-generated summary:Year by year, a chronicle follows Tian Zhuang, born in a mountain village in the 1970s, as she studies, works, marries and has a child, through four decades of change in China.
Mao Dun 2023 · Nominee
Yuanqu de baima
Title translated by AI:“The Departing White Horse”
Novel · War, Historical
AI-generated summary:A village woman who has long led her neighbours in supporting the Eighth Route Army ends up, through a mix-up, on the battlefields of the civil war in China's northeast with the team of porters she leads.
Mao Dun 2019 · Nominee
Bei yuan
Title translated by AI:“Northern Kite”
Ge Liang · 38 when first published
Novel · Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:In an imagined city between north and south China, the adopted son of a merchant family and the daughter of a declining gentry clan grow up between 1926 and 1947, as warlords, war and invasion sweep past.
Mao Dun 2019 · Nominee
捎话 · Shaohua
Liu Liangcheng · 56 when first published
Novel · 340 pages · War, Speculative
AI-generated summary:During a decades-long war between two ancient desert kingdoms, a translator who smuggles messages across the front is hired to deliver a young she-donkey as if she too were a message.
Mao Dun 2019 · Nominee
Xunzhao Zhang Zhan
Title translated by AI:“Looking for Zhang Zhan”
Novel · Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:A mother is asked by her son, studying abroad, to find his high-school classmate Zhang Zhan, the rebellious son of officials who vanished after his father died in a plane crash.
Mao Dun 2019 · Nominee
Kegu mingxin
Title translated by AI:“Etched in Bone and Heart”
Ye Zhaoyan · 61 when first published
Novel · Historical, War
AI-generated summary:In Nanjing in the 1920s and 1930s, a city at the centre of warlord wars and then the Japanese invasion, people of every class live through loves and losses they will never forget.
Mao Dun 2019 · Nominee
Dunhuang benji
Title translated by AI:“Annals of Dunhuang”
Novel · Historical, Family
AI-generated summary:In late-Qing Dunhuang, a forgotten corner of the Hexi corridor, an honoured but timid clan head, a doctor with a hidden past and a scheming small trader bind their three families together.
Mao Dun 2015 · Nominee
Wu xue wu tu
Title translated by AI:“My Blood, My Land”
Fan Wen · 52 when first published
Novel · War, Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:A veteran who left a wartime university to fight the Japanese in Burma is made, in 1951, 1957, 1967, 1975 and 1985, to write confession after confession about the life he led before 1949.
Mao Dun 2015 · Nominee
Kalabu fengbao
Title translated by AI:“Karabu Storm”
Novel · Love, Nature
AI-generated summary:In the small Xinjiang town of Jinghe, a solitary newcomer who walks into the desert to meet its sandstorms catches the eye of Yehaiya, a local woman about to marry the man she has loved for eight years.
Mao Dun 2015 · Nominee
Bei qu lai ci
Title translated by AI:“Going North and Coming Back”
Lin Bai · 55 when first published
Novel · Migration, Family
AI-generated summary:Two pairs of mothers and daughters, one educated, one from the countryside, leave the south for Beijing and struggle to find a place there, while the families they left behind live through half a century of change.
Mao Dun 2015 · Nominee
Yelusaleng
Xu Zechen · 36 when first published
Novel · Coming of age, Migration
AI-generated summary:About to leave for a doctorate in Jerusalem, a columnist born in the 1970s returns to the canal-side street where he grew up to sell his family's house, and the friends and the old guilt he left behind come back to him.
Mao Dun 2015 · Nominee
Huozhe zhi shang
Title translated by AI:“Above Mere Living”
Yan Zhen · 57 when first published
Novel · Satire
AI-generated summary:A university historian with a conscience tries to keep his integrity while colleagues who flatter and scheme rise all around him, in an academic world ruled by money and power.
Mao Dun 2011 · Nominee
Wo shi wo de shen
Title translated by AI:“I Am My Own God”
Deng Yiguang · 52 when first published
Novel · Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:In 1949 Wulitu Gula, a Mongolian divisional commander of the People's Liberation Army, enters Hankou and meets Sanuya, a Tatar woman trained in Moscow; married, quarrelling for life, they raise a houseful of children of their own and of fallen comrades.
Mao Dun 2011 · Nominee
Mai he
Title translated by AI:“Wheat River”
Guan Renshan · 47 when first published
Novel · Family, Love
AI-generated summary:In Yingwu village on the Wheat River in eastern Hebei, Cao Shuangyang leaves the land in 1998 to make money in a coal mine, losing his sweetheart Tao'er, while the blind storyteller Bai Liguo watches over the village and its past.
Mao Dun 2011 · Nominee
Nongli
Title translated by AI:“The Farmer's Calendar”
Guo Wenbin · 44 when first published
Novel · Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:In the village of Qiaojia Shangzhuang, the two youngest children of the man everyone calls Da Xiansheng, Wuyue and her little brother Liuyue, learn from their parents as the family keeps the festivals of the farming year.
Mao Dun 2011 · Nominee
农民帝国 · Nongmin diguo
Jiang Zilong · 67 when first published
Novel · 712 pages · Politics
AI-generated summary:Guo Cunxian, a good, hard-working farmer, leads his village of Guojiadian out of poverty during thirty years of reform, but money, desire and power begin to change him.
Mao Dun 2011 · Nominee
Biandi yueguang
Title translated by AI:“Moonlight Everywhere”
Liu Qingbang · 58 when first published
Novel · Politics, Love
AI-generated summary:In a village on the Central Plains during the Cultural Revolution, Huang Jinzhong, a landlord's son whose parents have died, is scorned for his class and wants above all to find a wife and escape his household of three bachelors.
Mao Dun 2008 · Nominee
Pingyuan
Title translated by AI:“The Plain”
Bi Feiyu · 41 when first published
Novel · Love, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Back in Wang Village after secondary school, Duanfang is crushed by farm work and falls in love with Sanya, a landlord's daughter, while Wu Manling, the village's zealous Party secretary, falls for him and could help him leave.
Mao Dun 2008 · Nominee
Shui ru dadi
Title translated by AI:“Land of Water and Milk”
Fan Wen · 42 when first published
Novel · Historical
AI-generated summary:Over a century of upheaval on the eastern edge of Tibet, in the canyon of the Lancang River below the sacred Kawagebo peak, peoples, faiths and cultures meet and clash.
Mao Dun 2008 · Nominee
Nü tongzhi
Title translated by AI:“Woman Comrade”
Fan Xiaoqing · 50 when first published
Novel · Politics
AI-generated summary:As China moves from a planned to a market economy, Wan Li spends more than a decade in the city government of Nanzhou, a small town in the south, admiring and envying her female colleagues and trading favours with the men.
Mao Dun 2008 · Nominee
Zhongguo jinweijun
Title translated by AI:“The Chinese Guards”
Novel · Love
AI-generated summary:He Donghang, head of staff of a provincial paramilitary police corps, comes home full of plans for a new helicopter unit and finds his wife with another man.
Mao Dun 2008 · Nominee
Rongzhuang nüren
Title translated by AI:“Woman in Uniform”
Novel · Family
AI-generated summary:Lü Shi, a senior colonel from a military family, one step from general, takes charge of political work at a signals station for what will be the last spring of her army career.
Mao Dun 2008 · Nominee
Sheng Tianmenkou
Title translated by AI:“Holy Tianmenkou”
Liu Xinglong · 49 when first published
Novel · Historical, Family
AI-generated summary:In a small town in the Dabie Mountains of southern China, several generations of women of the Xue family face the upheavals of the twentieth century with endurance and gentleness.
Mao Dun 2008 · Nominee
Lihua si xue
Title translated by AI:“Pear Blossom Like Snow”
Lu Yanzhou · 77 when first published
Novel · Love, Family
AI-generated summary:Three sisters take very different paths through changing times, their lives shaped by deep and lasting loves.
Mao Dun 2008 · Nominee
四十一炮 · Sishiyi pao
Mo Yan · 48 when first published
Novel · 386 pages
AI-generated summary:In a village during the rural reforms of the 1990s, two half-real, half-dreamed stories intertwine, in which human nature collides with greed, morality with money, faith with power and the village with the city.
Mao Dun 2008 · Nominee
Wo de shenghuo zhiliang
Title translated by AI:“The Quality of My Life”
Shao Li · 39 when first published
Novel · Politics, Love
AI-generated summary:Wang Qilong, assigned to a city job after university, climbs the official ladder to become mayor, but the troubled state of his love life casts a shadow over his career.
Mao Dun 2008 · Nominee
我的丁一之旅 · Wo de Ding Yi zhi lü
Shi Tiesheng · 55 when first published
Novel · 320 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:The story of Ding Yi, interwoven with the stories of his uncle, of Yi, of E, of Qin Han and others, follows the elusive paths of desire and love through different people, ages and times.
Mao Dun 2008 · Nominee
Shangtang shu
Title translated by AI:“The Book of Shangtang”
Novel
AI-generated summary:Shangtang, an ordinary village, is portrayed through nine aspects such as its geography, politics and roads, and through the joys and sorrows of the small people who live there.
Mao Dun 2008 · Nominee
英格力士 · Yinggelishi
Wang Gang · 44 when first published
Novel · 313 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:In Urumqi, in years of material and spiritual want, the boy Liu Ai falls under the spell of his gentle, elegant English teacher and dreams of owning a thick English dictionary and speaking perfect English.
Mao Dun 2008 · Nominee
Yueliang shang de gouhuo
Title translated by AI:“Bonfire on the Moon”
Novel · Historical
AI-generated summary:On the Sartu grasslands at the end of the 1950s, men and women throw their youth, and some their lives, into the great campaign that founded China's oil industry.
Mao Dun 2008 · Nominee
Qing hu
Title translated by AI:“Green Fox”
Wang Meng · 70 when first published
Novel · Love, Politics
AI-generated summary:The woman writer Lu Qiangu lives through love and disappointment while her talent and passion sit uneasily with the role history hands her, in a literary world of the 1980s and 1990s torn between repression and licence.
Mao Dun 2008 · Nominee
Jiqi
Title translated by AI:“Machines”
Novel · Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:Two generations of a working-class family, parents and four children, all of them factory workers, struggle in their own ways from the war against Japan and the early days of Chinese industry to the reform era.
Mao Dun 2008 · Nominee
Yuanqingfang laozhai
Title translated by AI:“The Old House at Yuanqingfang”
Novel
AI-generated summary:A four-hundred-year-old house in the Hui style, crowded with a dozen poor families, is about to be demolished for urban renewal when a fox spirit seems to haunt it, and those who doubt it come to grief.
Mao Dun 2008 · Nominee
藏獒 · Zang'ao
Novel · 476 pages · Nature
AI-generated summary:In the early years of the People's Republic, a mastiff from Shang Ama becomes leader of the dogs of the Xijiegu grasslands and settles a feud between two Tibetan tribes.
Mao Dun 2008 · Nominee
Chengmen
Title translated by AI:“The City Gate”
Novel
AI-generated summary:In the war against Japan, a cavalry division of archers raised on the northern grasslands and taken into the Eighth Route Army fights on as firearms and city warfare threaten to leave horsemen behind.
Mao Dun 2005 · Nominee
Baiyin gu
Title translated by AI:“Silver Valley”
Novel · Historical, Family
AI-generated summary:The business dealings, alliances and private secrets of a great family of Shanxi merchant bankers in imperial China, and the officials, scholars, escort agencies and missionaries around them.
Mao Dun 2005 · Nominee
Tian gao di hou
Title translated by AI:“High Heaven, Deep Earth”
Guan Renshan · 39 when first published
Novel · Family
AI-generated summary:The loves, feuds and hard lives of three farming families are caught up in thirty years of reform in the Chinese countryside, as the villagers struggle to change their fate.
Mao Dun 2005 · Nominee
Xi qu de qishou
Title translated by AI:“The Riders Who Went West”
Novel · War, Historical
AI-generated summary:In the 1920s, Ma Zhongying of Hezhou in Gansu rises against the warlords and his family's elders at seventeen. After a heavy defeat he leads what is left of his cavalry west into Xinjiang, against Sheng Shicai, who calls in Soviet troops.
Mao Dun 2005 · Nominee
Xiangyao
Title translated by AI:“Village Ballad”
Novel · 425 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:The farmer Wang Erxiang, at once kind and sly, simple and shrewd, weak and stubborn, meets a hard life with a cheerful philosophy, and his life with four women mirrors the state of the Chinese countryside.
Mao Dun 2005 · Nominee
Huainian lang
Title translated by AI:“Remembering Wolves”
Jia Pingwa · 48 when first published
Novel · Nature
AI-generated summary:A journalist for whom nothing goes right learns in Shangzhou that the hunting teams have left only fifteen wolves, each of them numbered. He sets out to find them and runs into his uncle, the leader of a wolf-hunting team.
Mao Dun 2005 · Nominee
花腔 · Huaqiang
Li Er · 36 when first published
Novel · 306 pages · Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:A search for the truth about Ge Ren, a revolutionary whose death is a mystery, pieces together his short life, his politics and his loves from witnesses who each tell the story in their own voice.
Mao Dun 2005 · Nominee
Yincheng gushi
Title translated by AI:“The Story of Silver City”
Novel · Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:In the autumn of 1910, in the salt town of Silver City, a revolutionary back from Japan sets off a bomb too early, killing the prefect and wrecking a planned uprising. The garrison commander, who was waiting to retire, must hunt the plotters down.
Mao Dun 2005 · Nominee
Dajiang chenzhong
Title translated by AI:“The Great River Weighs Heavy”
Lü Lei, Zhao Hong · Lü Lei 55, Zhao Hong 45 when first published
Novel · Politics
AI-generated summary:In Cangning, a poor county in the hills of the Pearl River Delta split by the Dong River, officials stake their careers on lifting the barren left bank, home to two hundred thousand farmers, out of poverty, while the right bank becomes a special zone.
Mao Dun 2005 · Nominee
Chu he Han jie
Title translated by AI:“The Chu River and the Han Border”
Novel · Family, Politics
AI-generated summary:Zhou Dongjin, a regimental commander on the frontier and son of an old general, owns up to a mistake of his own and forgoes a medal, then must decide, when an accident kills one of his soldiers and injures another, whether to tell the truth or dress it up as heroism.
Mao Dun 2005 · Nominee
檀香刑 · Tanxiang xing
Mo Yan · 46 when first published
Novel · 420 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:Around 1900, as Germans build a railway across Shandong, the opera singer Sun Bing leads the villagers against them. He is sentenced to the slow sandalwood death, and the executioner is Zhao Jia, father of his daughter's husband.
Mao Dun 2005 · Nominee
Shuqing niandai
Title translated by AI:“The Lyrical Years”
Novel · Coming of age, Politics
AI-generated summary:In Beijing between the late 1960s and the mid-1970s, small circles of outcast young people drift through the cracks of the Cultural Revolution, keeping an intellectual life alive in secret.
Mao Dun 2005 · Nominee
Xiema shanzhuang
Title translated by AI:“Xiema Mountain Village”
Novel · Love
AI-generated summary:In the village of Xiema, a fire on Yueyue's wedding night drives her and her husband Guojun apart, and draws the young villager Maizi into a tangle of feelings with Yueyue and with Guojun's sister Xiaoqing.
Mao Dun 2005 · Nominee
大浴女 · Da yu nü
Tie Ning · 43 when first published
Novel · 361 pages · Family, Coming of age, Love
AI-generated summary:Yin Xiaotiao grows up under the weight of her mother's affair and her little sister's accidental death, estranged from her mother, at odds with her other sister Xiaofan and in love with Fang Jing, a man who only takes.
Mao Dun 2005 · Nominee
大漠祭 · Damo ji
Novel · 486 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:On the edge of the Tengger Desert in western China, the farmer Lao Shun and his family struggle to stay alive, held back by old ideas and poverty and held together by a meagre love.
Mao Dun 2005 · Nominee
Caisangzi
Title translated by AI:“Picking Mulberries”
Ye Guangqin · 51 when first published
Novel · Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:After the fall of the Qing dynasty, the fourteen children of the Jin family, Manchu nobles in a Beijing mansion, scatter: the eldest son defies his class to join the Nationalist secret police, a sister lives for Peking opera, another is cast out for marrying for love.
Mao Dun 2005 · Nominee
Ba mianyang he shanyang fenkai
Title translated by AI:“Separate the Sheep from the Goats”
Novel
AI-generated summary:A twelve-year-old girl nicknamed Xiao Kuazi is sent to the countryside as an educated youth, then returns to the classroom as a sent-down pupil.
Mao Dun 2005 · Nominee
Zhongguo 1957
Title translated by AI:“China 1957”
You Fengwei · 58 when first published
Novel · Politics, Historical
AI-generated summary:When the Anti-Rightist Campaign reaches a Beijing university in 1957, the students Zhou Wenxiang, Feng Li, Li Wumeng and Wu Qidu are condemned and sent to prison, then moved from one labour camp to the next.
Mao Dun 2005 · Nominee
Yuanqu de yizhan
Title translated by AI:“The Receding Post Station”
Zhang Yigong · 67 when first published
Novel · 365 pages · Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:The lives of three intellectuals, a father, an uncle and an uncle by marriage, and of their families, steeped in the history and folk legends of Henan.
Mao Dun 2005 · Nominee
Juedui quanli
Title translated by AI:“Absolute Power”
Zhou Meisen · 46 when first published
Novel · Politics, Crime
AI-generated summary:When the wife and daughter of Qi Quansheng, Party secretary of the wealthy city of Jingzhou, and two senior officials are detained for corruption, the inquiry is led by Liu Zhongtian, the former mayor Qi forced out seven years earlier.
Mao Dun 2005 · Nominee
Yinyuehui
Title translated by AI:“The Concert”
Novel · War, Historical
AI-generated summary:Kim Yingzi, the little daughter of Korean resistance fighters left behind in China, grows up with the guerrillas of the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army, who have sworn to protect her as they fight the Japanese, and the wolves, in the mountain forests.