2021TLA New Bud Award

About the Book
Through poetic language never seen before, Chen Tsung-Hui speaks eloquently about the inevitable loss and gain of imaginative imagery to connect with a lively rhythm and grow out a style for a new era of literature. His work The Farthest Place I’ve Been starts with the memory of his mother’s passing following a long bout of chronic illness, the years of bullying he experienced as a child, his trials and tribulations fighting his intrinsic introversion during his university years, the wasted months and years of military service and his process of finding the meaning of life when working on Orchid Island, as well as his recently accompanying his father in practicing facing the fear of death in life’s every moment.

Judge Commentary (By Lee Pin Yao)
His collection of prose essays is split into three parts: “Living with Illness,” “Carrying Sickness,” and “After Ailment.” It’s the lone frontrunner on a long and thin cosmic trajectory. As illness comes, the heavens crumble and the earth splits apart. As sickness leaves, it leaves as quietly and delicately as silk thread being made. But the produced string sometimes resembles a thread somewhere in a sweater. Once it’s pulled, it can’t be put back, it’s pulled on by some enticement; Sometimes that string is a cocoon, spat out by you, yourself, which you use to protect the fragile chrysalis within.