Food delivery courier unexpectedly becomes a famous writer

Wang Jibin, a 56-year-old food delivery courier in China, has been awarded one of the country's most prestigious literary honors — the Lu Xun Literary Prize.This success was achieved thanks to his poems inspired by the life of an ordinary working person.

Wang's collection "Low Flight" was deemed worthy of the award. The work poignantly depicts the daily challenges, hard labor, and life trials that couriers face. Interestingly, some poems were written by the author on scraps of paper between deliveries.

The Lu Xun Prize is named after one of the greatest figures of 20th-century Chinese literature, recognized as the founder of modern Chinese literature.

Wang Jibin began his courier work around 2019. However, he had been interested in reading long before that and regularly published his poems and essays on social media. In 2022, his poem "The Hurrying Man" went viral on social media. The work was inspired by an incident where a courier spent hours searching for an address due to a customer providing the wrong location.

In 2023, he published his first poetry collection titled "The Hurrying Man: Poems of a Food Delivery Courier." In 2024, his book "Low Flight" was published. While preparing this collection, the author interviewed nearly 200 couriers to study their lives and problems.

One of the poems caught readers' attention with the following lines:

"Who said that spreading wings only means flying high? Flying low is also a flight."

Despite winning the award, Wang Jibin stated he has no intention of quitting his courier job. He says he does not need the money, but he enjoys the working environment and it helps him stay in good physical shape.

"I love a simple life. No award will change me," he said.

Wang Jibin's success has once again demonstrated that in recent years, people engaged in manual labor in China are achieving great success in literature. Previously, former courier Xu Anyan's memoir "I Deliver Parcels in Beijing" became a bestseller, and migrant worker Fan Yusu's autobiographical essay caused a huge stir across the Chinese internet.

According to experts, such works play an important role in conveying the lives, dreams, and daily problems of millions of people working in the country's massive gig economy to society through literature.