2021 TLA Annual Golden Grand Laurel Award

About the Book
Farewell marks an important turning point in author Chung Wen-Yin’s writing career. Her latest novel traverses the simultaneous beauty and cruelty of life. It tells of life and death, emptiness and form, and of the greatest desires of humankind.

Judge Commentary (by Chiang Ya-Ni)
Chung Wen-Yin has through the novel Farewell, written a momentous send-off. It’s a story about a journey of a woman bidding farewell to her mother, a farewell to love, and a farewell to a certain way of life. The journey begins in a small room in Taiwan, and arrives before Tibetan plateaus, sky burial towers and a thousand-year-old temple. This is a magnificent 410,000 word farewell, one does not only carry the deceased and death on the journey, but also holds the author’s densely intertwined words and emotions close to their heart along the way. The further you go to say goodbye, the further you travel. And the further you travel to say goodbye, the more enlightened you become. All kinds of attachments to departure and arrival seem to be let go along the way. As if through processing all the emotions that arise from bidding farewell you realise that there is no need to say goodbye.

Yet you don’t truly let go.

Chung Wen-Yin has used this novel and the motifs within her literary creations to bid farewell. A motif is her mother’s body. Those female forms and daughters portrayed in works of literature in the past, in Farewell metamorphose