First Book Prize Winner of 2019:
Dr. Hawk Chang (Tsung Chi)
This year’s winner, Dr. Hawk Chang (Tsung Chi) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Literature and Cultural Studies at the Education University of Hong Kong. He received his PhD from National Taiwan Normal University and did his postdoctoral studies at Trinity College Dublin. Dr. Chang’s research and teaching interests include Modern Irish Literature, Women’s Writing, Cultural and Translation Studies. His translation of John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World was published by Bookman (Taipei).
Hawk Chang (right) receives the First Book Prize 2019. To the left, incoming President of the HKAH, Maureen Sabine.
The Academy has named Dr. Chang First Book Prize Winner of 2019 for his manuscript Ireland Then and Now: Traditions and Difference in Contemporary Irish Short Fiction. This work looks at issues of gender, sexuality and the body, as well as identity, migration and nostalgia in the contemporary short fiction of Irish (or diasporic) writers Maeve Binchy, Colm Toibin, Edna O’Brien, Emma Donoghue, and Donal Ryan. Reviewers of Ireland Then and Now commended his feminist cultural reading of Irish women writers and the Irish social landscape they describe.