Chang Kuei-hsing

Chang's novel, When Wild Boars Cross the River has won the 2019 Taiwan Literature Award, where Keui-hsing received USD $32,000 in prize money. The novel also won the 8th Dream of the Red Chamber Ward as "The World’s Distinguished Novel in Chinese today". The University of Oklahoma announced on November 2, 2022 that it was awarding Chang the 2023 Newman Prize for Chinese Literature.

Throughout 1980's-1990's Chang has influenced the literary culture in Taiwan and won many literary awards. Chang has won literary awards in Taiwan, Malaysia, and Hong Kong, including three prizes for Monkey Cup (2000), several awards for 2020 Dream of the Red Chamber Novel Prize, and for Wild Boars Ford the River (Yezhu duhe 野豬渡河, 1998).

Chang moved to Taiwan in 1976 to attend university at National Taiwan Normal University, where he also earned a degree in English. He pursued a higher education and careers in Taiwan due to his "marginal status in Malaysia" and the support of Taiwan government's "long-standing incentive scholarship programs". He later had taught English at a high school in Taipei for almost forty years. During that time, he was writing a series of novels, many set partly in Borneo and partly in Taiwan.

For example, his novel Herd of Elephants (also known as Elephant Herd and Elephant Tropes), “employs poetic wordplay and explores anthropological metaphors of movement from the two competing homelands - one in original (Borneo) and the other imaginary (China)” (Tan, 236) providing a Sinophone metanarrative to spread cultural and historical knowledge on the topics of Sinophone Malaysian literature. The "main diegesis begins in late 1973, at a crucial turning point in Sarawak's multi-decade Communist insurgency". Herd of Elephants revolves around a protagonist Shi Shicai, who is on a mission to murder his uncle Yu Jiatong to avenge for the death of his elder brothers. The backdrop of the story reflects the "struggle between the Communist insurgency and government forces that are a threat to the newly independent Southeast Asian nation states of Malaysia and Indonesia" (Rajos, 113) however Chang overlaps two sets of the southern movement (one being the Chinese presence and the other the indigenous presence) to complete a complex novel with a twist to the end plot. Herd of Elephants is a novel of "how a region in the Global South itself (in this case, the Malaysian state of Sarawak) is impacted by metaphorically infectious agents linked to a powerful nation directly to North (namely, China)".

Chang Kuei-hsing (Chinese: 張貴興; pinyin: Zhāng Guìxīng; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: Tiuⁿ Kùi-heng; Hakka Chinese Pha̍k-fa-sṳ: Chông Kui-hin, b. 1956) is an award-winning Taiwanese author, novelist and educator. Born in North Borneo (Sarawak), Malaysia in a Hakka family, "growing up in a state of Sarawak amidst a racially mixed Chinese and native communities".