Wu Ming-yi

Biography

In March 2018 the Taiwanese writer Wu Ming-yi found that his country had suddenly changed on the International Booker Prize list: where it had said “Taiwan”, the organisers wrote “Taiwan, China”. He replied on Facebook that this did not match his own position, and said he would seek help. The British press linked the change to pressure from the embassy of the People’s Republic of China. Taiwan lodged a protest through its representative office in London. After the Easter holiday the organisers restored the earlier entry.

Wu Ming-yi was born on 20 June 1971. Sources give the place of birth as Taoyuan or Taipei; in both cases he is said to have grown up in Taoyuan.

He studied mass communication at Fu Jen Catholic University, specialising in advertising. He took his doctorate in Chinese literature at National Central University. He began writing while still at school: the story “Father’s Wooden Ruler” won a national student literature prize in 1989, and in 1992 “The Last Xiyilieke” was honoured with a prize for debut authors. A few years later he won a new-author prize from a Taiwanese literary magazine for the story “Traces of the Enemy”.

His first story collection, “We’re Closed Today”, came out in 1997. Since 2000 he has taught at National Dong Hwa University, where his courses cover nature writing, modern literature, literary theory and creative writing. He became an associate professor in 2010 and a full professor in 2012.

It was in those years that his main theme took shape. “The Book of Lost Butterflies” (2000) and “The Dao of Butterflies” (2003) are about Taiwanese butterflies and the people who catch them, and he did the illustrations and design himself. The first won the Taipei Literature Award and was named one of the ten best books of the year by the Central Daily News. The second won the China Times Open Book Award in 2003. In 2004 came his first scholarly monograph, “Liberating Nature through Writing”, on modern Taiwanese nature writing, later made part of a three-volume set. Alongside this he became an environmental activist: he sits on the board of the Society of Ecological Concern (as I render its name) and of the Kuroshio Ocean Education Foundation, and since 2013 he has funded a scholarship named after his mother.

The novel “The Man with the Compound Eyes” (2011) is an ecological parable. A young man from the fictional Pacific island of Wayo Wayo arrives on the east coast of Taiwan as a giant floating island of rubbish approaches it. The book won the China Times Open Book Award and the main fiction prize of the Taipei International Book Exhibition. Harvill Secker published it in English in 2013 and Éditions Stock in French in 2014, and that same year the French translation won the Prix du livre insulaire. Translations followed into Turkish, Czech, Japanese, Polish, Italian, German and other languages; the Russian edition appeared from AST in 2021. In 2015 the Chinese text was named one of the best Chinese works of fiction of the past century by Time Out Beijing.

The collection “The Illusionist on the Skywalk” (2011) became, ten years later, the basis of a ten-episode series by the Taiwanese broadcaster PTS, shown in February and March 2021. The novel “The Stolen Bicycle” (2015) is built as a family saga set against the history of bicycles in Taiwan under Japanese administration and during the Second World War. The elephant Lin Wang and the butterfly catchers appear there too, and again the author made the illustrations himself. The English translation appeared in 2017, and in 2018 the novel became the first Taiwanese book on the Booker list.

The collection “The Land of Little Rain” (2019) and the novel “The Sea Breeze Club” (2023) followed; the latter won the China Times Open Book Award and the main fiction prize at the Taiwan Bookstore Award. In 2025 Wu Ming-yi became the youngest winner in the literature category of the Taiwan National Award for Arts.