Does the wild lily have spring too? (Food delivery rider wins the Lu Xun Literature Prize)

For 38 years of his life, he wrote in cigarette packs and cardboard boxes. He was born in Kunshan, Jiangsu, a delivery rider.
Inspired by the everyday challenges of delivery work, Wang Jibing described the suffering of ordinary people, yet he didn’t rely on begging for sympathy to earn such a high literary honor—
Around 2019, at age 56, Old Wang became a delivery rider. His poems and prose gained massive reach on social media.
In 2022, one of his poems, “Hurrying People,” went viral online. Its inspiration came from an incident in 2019: after a customer entered the wrong address, he spent hours on a frustrating delivery.
In 2023, he published his first poetry collection, “The Hurrying Ones: Poems by a Meal Delivery Knight.”
Published in 2024, “Flying at Low Altitudes” is a poetry collection inspired by interviews and research involving about 200 delivery riders. (It’s filled with specific details about delivery guys—one could say it’s portrayed with meticulous precision, full of emotion.)
“Who says spreading your wings means flying high? Flying low is also flying,” one line in his poems laments!
In today’s environment where academic misconduct is rampant in China and AI is all the rage, these words feel so precious and down-to-earth!