Abel Han Song (English Language and Literature, Year 4) won the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) Literature Award 2015. The award-winning novella will be published by Ink Literary Monthly. 

The biennial award for Sinophone novella writing, TSMC Literature Award provides an avenue for new writers around the globe to gain exposure. The Statues, Abel’s award-winning novella (in Chinese), is inspired by his parents’ generation and he used a mythological way to capture the essence of their daily lives which had been affected by many historical events. 

Abel was pleased and surprised to win the award. The most exciting part for him was to be able to get comments and suggestions from famous writers who sat on the panel of judges. He is also pleased that it will be featured in Ink Literary Monthly, enabling his novella to reach a wide readership. He added that feedback would be beneficial for his future writing. 

Abel started writing in Chinese and won an award when he was in secondary school. He thinks that to some extent, Chinese vernacular fiction is influenced by western culture so what he learnt from studying English Language and Literature, such as theories, philosophies and methodologies, helped him to reconsider and reexamine the language and storytelling in his Chinese fictional works. 

He thanked the Department of English Language and Literature for equipping him with a new lens to interpret contemporary China and a lot of new ways to put his thoughts into words, and Faculty of Arts for providing a creative atmosphere for his writing. He was also grateful for having the good fortune to meet many renowned Sinophone writers and study from their first-hand experience at International Writers' Workshops organised by the Faculty of Arts. 

Abel’s writing skill has been widely recognised by the literary community. He won first prize in the New Concept Writing Competition 2012 and first runner-up in the Prose division of the Intervarsity Creative Writing Competition 2015. He was also one of the contributors to the debut issue of the English Department’s Edge: HKBU Creative Journal.