A Chinese food delivery rider who turned the frustrations of gig work into poetry has won one of the country’s highest literary honours.
Wang Jibing, 56, received the prestigious Lu Xun Literary Prize for Low Flight, a collection inspired by conversations with over 200 delivery riders and the everyday pressures of China’s vast gig economy.
Mr Wang won the prestigious award – named after a writer known as the father of modern Chinese literature – by drawing on the lives and struggles of fellow couriers to write about modern China.
He told local media that he spoke to more than 200 delivery riders in hopes that readers “would better understand the challenges they face”.
Born in east-central China’s Xuzhou, Jiangsu province, Mr Wang left school when he was just 14 due to financial hardships at home.
He picked up several jobs, including construction work, scavenging for waste and selling things at a street stall, but never lost his love for reading and writing.
After becoming a food delivery rider, a job that gave him flexibility to write, Mr Wang began posting his work on social media.
But a botched delivery in 2019 changed the course of Mr Wang's life. Working in Kunshan, in China's eastern Jiangsu province, he spent hours searching three residential buildings and climbing 18 flights of stairs after a customer entered the wrong address. When he finally reached the door, he was met not with understanding but with an angry tirade for being late.
On the journey home, Mr Wang channelled his frustration into a poem, Man in a Hurry. It struck a chord online, quickly going viral and transforming him from a delivery rider into a writer.
Since then, he has drawn on the people he meets, the places he passes and the emotional toll of life as a delivery rider to shape his work.
"I held my breath and felt extremely nervous," Mr Wang said in an interview with Global Times on 15 July, after he came to know he had won the award. “Once it was revealed, everything was settled.”
He said he was extremely nervous due to the media attention on him after his poem was nominated for the award.
Mr Wang said he had no intention of quitting his delivery job despite the recognition and he planned to continue until he turned 60.
"Financially, I don't need to do this job to make a living, but I love the vibe of the work and it keeps me fit," he said.
"I want to live a down-to-earth life, and the award will never change who I am. I will keep writing and sharing ordinary people's life stories through literature.”
The details for monetary awards to the recipients of the Lu Xun Literary Prize are not known. But the prize money in 2014 stood at 100,000 Chinese yuan (£11,000).
It was in 2023 that he published his first poetry collection, Man in a Hurry: Poems of a Food Delivery Rider.
His poem Low Flight was published in 2024.
"Who says spreading your wings means flying high? Flying low is also flying," reads one of the lines.
“Literature used to be like a pyramid, with everyone’s attention fixed on the few people at the top,” Mr Wang said in another interview. “Now it’s turning its focus to the base, giving voice to the silent majority.”
An English translation of Low Flight is scheduled to be published by US-based Chax Press later this year.
The award for Mr Wang comes as a growing number of blue-collar and grassroots workers gain recognition in China in the literary world.
Among them is a former miner, Chen Nianxi, whose poetry and nonfiction stories document the lives of workers, and a farmer, Yu Xiuhua, whose work dissects subjects like love, desire and living with cerebral palsy.
A 2023 memoir by former courier Hu Anyan, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, has sold nearly two million copies in China since its release. An English translation by Jack Hargreaves was published in 2025.
