Longing Ballad (Wang Anyi's work awarded the 5th Mao Dun Literature Prize)

Author: Wang Anyi
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-08-01
Features: The forty years of love and passion of a woman are written with a delicate and brilliant pen, making them poignant and full of ups and downs. In the 1940s, Wang Qiyao, still a high school student, was chosen as the "Miss Shanghai," marking the beginning of her tumultuous life. She became the "canary in the cage" of a high-ranking official, transforming from a girl to a true woman. After the liberation of Shanghai, the official perished, and Wang Qiyao became an ordinary citizen. While her life appeared ordinary and uneventful, the tides of her emotions never subsided. Her complex relationships with several men were all destined. In the 1980s, at the age of fifty, Wang Qiyao could not escape her fate, becoming entangled in an abnormal love affair with her daughter's male classmate and ultimately being accidentally killed, meeting a tragic end. This Manfreda Literature Prize-winning The Longing Song is also the pinnacle work of renowned female writer Wang Anyi.
Author Bio: Wang Anyi—Born in Nanjing in 1954, she moved to Shanghai with her mother in 1955. In 1970, she went to Anhui for the Down-to-the-Fields Campaign. In 1972, she joined the Xuzhou Regional Literary and Art Troupe. In 1978, she returned to Shanghai and worked as a fiction editor for Children's Times. Since 1987, she has been a professional writer with the Shanghai Writers' Association. Since 1976, she has published essays and works such as the novels Rain, Rain, Rain, The End of This Train Station, Flow, Xiao Baozhuang, Uncle's Story, Students of the 69th Middle School, and The Longing Song, among others, totaling approximately 4 million words in short, medium, and long fiction, as well as numerous essays and literary theories. She has won the National Short Story Award once and the National Middle-Grade Novel Award twice. Her works have been translated into foreign languages such as English, French, Dutch, German, Japanese, Czech, and Korean.
A rare work in recent years: The forty years of love and passion of a woman are written with a delicate and brilliant pen, making them poignant and full of ups and downs. Everything is full of charm, and the time element that spreads like water is even more evocative, making one feel a sense of melancholy, as if that helpless entanglement slowly fades and cycles away in time!