Winners of the 22nd Five-Tiger Hill Literature Awards were announced on May 26. All of them are the students of the Chinese Department, except three, who are from different departments.

The first place in the fiction category went to Sung Zi-ching of the Chinese Department. Her classmates, Gao Pei-hwa and Chang Yu-shuan won the first place in prose and poetry respectively, whereas Lin Jin-rong won a recommendation for this year’s new category, Special Awards.

The judges of the Awards were pleased with the overall standard of the works they had been reading. In the prose category, they read a very diverse collection of works and some were fairly creative, yet, they feel the contents of these works are not quite substantial. Nonetheless, they found the top winner, Gao’s work, “The puzzles pieces falling off from the third floor of No. 41-1”, is creative in her use of punctuations which conjures up a sort of half rock and roll and half soul rhythm. Rather unique and easy to read, is the comment of one of the judges, Chung Wen-ying.

As for fiction, which is indeed a very difficult genre to tackle with, the key to a success story is, well, telling a story compellingly without losing focus, writer Wu He points out. The top prize, Sung’s “Hide and Seek” apparently meets the criterion. Su Wei-jen, one the judges and well known writer, says that Sung’s work has a great plot and the development of it is focused and tight.

In the poetry category, the first prize, “To those of us who are fading” by Chang, won approval from the three judges in this category unanimously. Xian Yang, one of them, praises her work as extremely neat, dealing with time, life, home town, and sentiment of the past smoothly. “It was a very pleasant read,” he comments.

Other poems that won the best works were equally interesting. For instance, “Years” by Huang Pei-Tsang of the Chinese Department, is filled with colorful language, depicting the figure of a female dancer vividly. Its portrays of a woman whose beauty fades with time and her grappling with this fact come through very well to the readers, according to Yan Ai-ling, one of the judges. Apart from this work, there were four additional best works having been selected, as the standard of this year was exceptionally high.

The newly added category, the Special Awards, unfortunately did not find a top winner. The judges insist that this is the right decision under this circumstance, as the message for the future contenders they have sent out is to work harder because it is worth winning. For winning the top prize in this category, contenders were asked to write about Tamsui, and maybe due to its vagueness and complexity, many people came up short with their stories. Lin’s work, which won her the recommendation award, is one of the few that has a coherent structure. Other best works, such as “Raining season in Tamsui”, “Eternal final exams on campus” and “McKay Street” are also satisfactory.(~ Ying-hsueh Hu )

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