Wang Jibing, 56, took the poetry award at the ninth Lu Xun Literary Prize last month for his third collection, "Low Flight."

China News Service reported that the China Writers Association announced 35 winning works across seven categories on July 15, covering writing published between 2022 and 2025.

He is the first delivery rider to win the prize, which was established in 1996 and has been awarded every four years since its sixth edition. Previous recipients include Shi Tiesheng, Bi Feiyu and Chi Li, all honored in the inaugural 1995 to 1996 round.

Wang interviewed more than 140 riders face to face and surveyed 60 others by questionnaire for the collection, reaching roughly 200 couriers in total, he told Modern Express.

He wanted readers who finished the book to leave riders fewer bad reviews and more good ones, he said.

Shanghai Observer reported he paid CNY50 (US$7) for each completed form and approached the rest cold in the service corridors behind shopping malls, opening with a line asking whether they had a minute to talk.

He was delivering food the day before the results were released, he told China City News, and intends to keep riding.

Even if he stops, he said, he will not write full-time, because making writing a profession would bring professional pressure, and he writes because it makes him happy.

Writing in People's Daily on July 26, Wang asked readers to give him time, saying that years from now they would find he had always been a quietly flowing river.

Chinese food delivery rider Wang Jibing. Photo courtesy of Wang Jibing

Born in November 1969 into a poor farming family in Pizhou, in northern Jiangsu Province, Wang dropped out of middle school and left home in 1988 for construction work in Shenyang.

He began writing that year and published his first short fiction in 1992.

While working on a novel he became severely malnourished and was hospitalized repeatedly, he wrote in the same essay. His father, convinced the writing was a form of spirit possession, burned more than 200,000 characters of manuscript and forbade him to write again.

Wang had written across the widest part of his notebook that year that he would become a great writer, and described closing the notebook afterward as breaking the wings of a dream.

Twenty five years passed before he submitted work for publication again.

He worked construction sites, a brick factory and the docks, dredged sand from a river for three years, ran a street stall and collected scrap in Kunshan, the source of his pen name, Shihuang, meaning to scavenge.

He kept writing throughout, on cigarette packets and flattened cardboard, then sold the cardboard as waste.

He resumed submitting in 2017, joined the Xuzhou writers' association the following year, and in 2019, at 50, registered as a delivery rider in Kunshan, the oldest at his station.

Xinhua Daily reported he has written roughly 6,000 poems and published six collections.

His best-known poem, "People Who Rush Time", came out of a 2019 delivery that a wrong address stretched into an hours-long ordeal ending in a platform penalty. Sixth Tone reported it went viral on Weibo in July 2022.

In January, Wang published his first non-fiction collection, Chengzhen, named for his mother, Bao Chengzhen. Using her name as the title, he said, was a way of telling her that as long as someone remembers her, she never really left.

"Low Flight" is due for release in the U.S. in December, Modern Express reported. The book also took Wang to Italy, where he met a doctoral researcher who has since become close friends with several of the riders he interviewed.