Food Delivery Driver Wins Literary Prize for Poetry

China's latest major literary star spends much of his day on a scooter, the BBC reports. Wang Jibing, a 56-year-old food delivery driver, has won the Lu Xun Literary Prize—one of the country's top writing honors—for Low Flight, a poetry collection drawn from his own life and the stories of some 200 fellow couriers. Wang, who left school at 14 due to financial struggles at home and spent decades doing odd jobs before joining the gig economy around 2019, jotted many of his lines on scraps of paper between orders. His work offers a close-up look at the pressure and pace faced by China's delivery workers, a subject that helped one of his earlier poems, "Man in a Hurry," go viral in 2022. He's earned the nickname "delivery poet," Newsweek reports.

The Lu Xun prize, named for the towering 20th-century satirist, carried a reported payout of about $15,000 in 2014, though current figures aren't public. Wang told state media the attention has been stressful and said he plans to keep delivering food until 60, describing the job as something he enjoys and a way to stay grounded. He's previously worked in construction and selling goods at a street stall, the Independent reports. His win adds to a growing wave of blue-collar literature in China, including the bestselling courier memoir I Deliver Parcels in Beijing and the widely shared essay by a migrant worker, "I Am Fan Yusu."