Wang Jibing spent years delivering other people’s orders through the streets of Kunshan; in the brief intervals that remained—outside restaurants, beside elevators, at traffic lights—he assembled a literature of his own.

On July 15, the 56-year-old courier won the poetry category of the ninth Lu Xun Literature Prize for Low Flight, a collection rooted in the hurried, precarious lives of China’s delivery workers.

The award is among the country’s most prestigious literary distinctions.

Organized by the China Writers Association and named for the foundational figure of modern Chinese literature, it recognizes work across seven categories, including fiction, poetry, literary reportage, criticism and translation.

The ninth edition covered books and writing first published between 2022 and 2025; 35 works were selected across the categories.

Wang is the first writer identified publicly as a food-delivery rider to receive the prize.

When the result arrived, his initial emotion was not triumph but release.

The attention generated by his nomination had left him anxious, and the announcement finally ended days of uncertainty.

He later insisted that the honor would not alter the rhythms or substance of his life.

“I was delivering food yesterday,” he said after winning.

Low Flight, first published in China in February 2024, is Wang’s third poetry collection.

Its title refuses the conventional assumption that flight is meaningful only when it reaches great altitude.

A life conducted close to the ground—among apartment entrances, restaurant counters, staircases and congested streets—still possesses motion, dignity and imaginative reach.

The book was not composed solely from personal recollection.

Wang interviewed more than 140 delivery riders and gathered written responses from over 60 others, approaching poetry with something resembling field research.

Their stories allowed him to move beyond a solitary worker’s testimony and construct a broader portrait of people whose labor is visible everywhere while their interior lives remain largely unseen.

Delivery platforms have become an essential layer of urban China.

Riders carry meals, groceries and household goods across cities at remarkable speed, but their work is governed by tight schedules, customer ratings, traffic conditions and algorithmic calculations.

A delayed restaurant order, an incorrect address or an elevator that stops on every floor can consume time for which the worker, rather than the system, may be penalized.

Wang knows this pressure intimately.

One of the experiences that sharpened his public voice occurred in 2019, when a customer supplied an incorrect address.

He searched several buildings, climbed 18 floors and was then berated for arriving late.

The encounter helped produce People in a Hurry, the poem that brought him widespread recognition.

Its compressed language turned the delivery rider’s contest with the clock into something bodily: wind, blades, fire and water forced from the same exhausted human frame.

By then, Wang had been writing for decades.

Born in November 1969 in Jiangsu province, he left school during his teenage years because his family could not afford to keep him there.

The decades that followed were filled with work that rarely enters literary biographies: construction, sand dredging, waste collection, street vending and other temporary jobs.

He began writing in 1988, without institutional training, financial security or a room reserved for creative work.

A large body of his early manuscripts was destroyed by his father, who regarded writing as an impractical distraction from earning a living.

Wang continued.

When proper paper was unavailable, he used discarded packaging, cigarette boxes, old newspapers, his telephone and even the palm of his hand.

Digital literary forums later became an informal workshop, allowing him to share drafts, study technique and revise poems in response to readers.

He became a delivery rider at about 50, one of the oldest workers at his station.

The job supplied both hardship and subject matter.

Over roughly 150,000 kilometers on the road, he has written more than 6,000 poems, although published accounts differ slightly on the total.

Several collections have followed, including People in a Hurry and Holding a Beam of Human Light.

His language is deliberately accessible.

Rather than disguising ordinary experience beneath elaborate literary machinery, Wang concentrates on the physical details through which economic pressure is felt: a printed order attached to packaging, a motorcycle wheel turning through rain, the shortening interval before a deadline, the customer waiting beyond a locked entrance.

The poems do not present riders merely as victims.

They record irritation, endurance, humor, tenderness and the private moral calculations that accompany public-facing work.

That directness has helped his poetry travel well beyond conventional literary circles.

It has also prompted debate among readers and writers who question whether personal authenticity and social significance necessarily amount to artistic distinction.

The criticism is part of a larger argument in contemporary Chinese culture over who is permitted to speak with literary authority and how work emerging outside universities, journals and professional associations should be judged.

Wang’s victory places that argument inside one of China’s highest literary institutions.

He belongs to a widening constellation of writers whose occupations have shaped their public identities: miners, domestic workers, market vendors, factory employees and couriers.

Their work is sometimes grouped under labels such as worker literature, grassroots writing or new popular literature.

The terminology can create its own enclosure, treating a writer’s occupation as both introduction and permanent category.

Wang’s prize complicates that separation.

Low Flight was honored not in a special division for workers, but in the national poetry category.

The award also arrives as China’s platform economy wrestles with the human consequences of speed.

Delivery riders embody the convenience of a system designed to make waiting disappear for customers.

Wang’s poems restore the missing minutes by showing who absorbs them: the worker running upstairs, searching for an address or calculating whether a red light can be obeyed without risking a penalty.

No current cash value for the prize has been publicly announced.

Its greater effect may be cultural.

Wang’s experience has moved from social-media curiosity to officially recognized literature, carrying the private vocabulary of delivery work into a national institution named after a writer who treated the lives of ordinary people as material worthy of enduring attention.

An English edition of Low Flight is scheduled for publication in the United States in December 2026. Its international readers will encounter a poet whose route to literary recognition did not bypass manual labor but passed directly through it—one order, one staircase and one salvaged fragment of paper at a time.