Name Cheng Ch'ing-wen | Role Writer | |
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Books Three-Legged Horse, Magnolia: Stories of Taiwanese Women | ||
Cheng Ch'ing-wen (Chinese: 鄭清文; born September 16, 1932) is a Taiwanese writer and a graduate of National Taiwan University. He worked at the government-run Hua Nan Bank for forty years. His works in English are generally under the transliteration Cheng Ch'ing-Wen and that is how he is described in many English-language publications published in Taiwan. The transliteration Tzeng Ching-wen is also used.
He is a leader of the Taiwanese "nativist" movement. Zheng [or Cheng] is a speaker of Taiwanese Hokkien. He graduated from elementary school in Taiwan with six years of instruction in Japanese, and only thereafter began to learn to write in Chinese.
A collection of twelve of his short stories, Three-Legged Horse, was made available in English in 1998, and was a finalist for the 1999 Kiriyama Prize for translation.
He has written both novels, short stories, and works for children. His three works for children (Swallow Heart Berries, Sky Lanterns/Mother, and Picking Peaches) are populated with birds, insects, and other animals that all have the ability to speak, in a manner common to fairy tales.