* 2024 Taiwan Literature Award (Annual Golden Grand Laurel)

Multi-award-winning novelist Ping Lu in this, her most celebrated work, explores the unfolding fate of modern-day Taiwan by revisiting formative characters from Taiwan’s past, including Ming Dynasty pirate-turned-Admiral Zheng Zhilong, VOC Governor of Formosa Frederick Coyett, and ROC President Chiang Ching-Kuo.

After publishing To the East of the East in 2011 and Ilha Formosa in 2012, Ping Lu finished her highly acclaimed series this year with the release of Taiwan Literature Awards for Books’ 2024 Annual Golden Grand Laurel Award winner Passing. While each book in this trilogy stands on its own, a shared motif and style tie them all closely together, with readers finding new appreciation for Taiwan’s present through getting to know some of those who shaped its past.

To the East of the East: In search of her missing husband, a writer travels from Taiwan to Beijing only to find the Public Security Bureau with nothing new to share. In her continued writings she finds herself responding to her husband’s final letters in her imagined discussions between the Qing Emperor and Admiral Zheng. Then, a chance meeting with a self-professed fugitive from the Chinese authorities ends with him begging her to take him in…

Ilha Formosa: In love with a woman working for Taiwan’s national intelligence service, a US foreign service officer naively divulges politically sensitive insights that land him in prison. He likens his plight to that of Frederick Coyett, the imprisoned and banished Dutch East India Company governor of Taiwan. They both had been ostracized for a love no country indifferent to all but utilitarian concerns could understand.

Passing: A once-gifted medium, at wits’ end after losing contact with the Taoist deity Nezha, meets a clairvoyant not yet aware of his powers. The massage therapy he takes at her suggestion is the key that opens her link with a princely deity who gradually enlightens her to the deity’s close-knit relationship with her own intergenerational trauma.

Ping Lu employs historical elements to explore modern-day social issues from both a personal and an island-nation lens. What makes these three books so interesting is discovering where and how these perspectives overlap and why they sometimes don’t.