NNU Professor Fengxia Tan Selected as One of the 10 Judges for the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2024
The jury list of the 2024 Hans Christian Andersen Award was announced. Professor Fengxia Tan of Nanjing Normal University in China was selected as a jury member. This is the second time that a Chinese scholar has been on the jury of the Hans Christian Andersen Award, following Professor Qing Wu of Beijing Foreign Studies University.
The Hans Christian Andersen Award is the highest international award in the field of children's books for young people, with Queen Margrethe II of Denmark as its supreme guardian. It is awarded every two years by the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) to authors and illustrators who have made significant and lasting contributions to children's and teenagers’ literature as an effort to recognize their lifetime achievements. In 2016, Wenxuan Cao won the Hans Christian Andersen Award, becoming the first Chinese author to receive the award.
The following ten experts in children's books have been selected by the IBBY Executive Committee to serve on the 2024 Hans Christian Andersen Award Jury:
Evelyn Arizpe: from Mexico/UK, a professor and researcher of children's literature at the University of Glasgow.
Brenda Dales: an independent scholar from the United States, formerly an assistant teaching professor in the School of Education at Miami University in Ohio.
Sabine Fuchs: a retired professor of children's literature from the School of Teacher Education of the University of Styria, Austria.
Diana Laura Kovach: a language and literature teacher in a secondary school and teacher training institute in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Shereen Kreidieh: a publisher and part-time teacher from Haigazian University in Beirut, Lebanon.
Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer: a professor in the German Department at the University of Tübingen, Germany.
Jaana Pesonen: a university lecturer and researcher in children's literature from the School of Education of the University of Helsinki, Finland.
Pavle Učakar: former art director of Mladinska Knjiga publishing house in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Morgane Vasta: a mediator from France specializing in children's literature and lecturer in children's and teenagers’ fiction at the University of Sorbonne Paris Nord.
The jury will work under the direction of Jury President Anastasia Arkhipova, supported by IBBY Secretary General Carolina Ballester, the ex officio member of the jury.
The nominations for the 2024 Hans Christian Andersen Award will be announced at the Bologna Children's Book Fair on March 6, 2023.
The Introduction of Fengxia Tan
As a professor and doctoral supervisor in the School of Chinese Language and Literature of NNU with a Ph.D. in Literature, she has teaching and research interests in Chinese modern and contemporary literature, children's literature, comparative literature, children's films, etc. She has conducted research and been a visiting scholar in the Department of Education of the University of Cambridge, the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy of the Academia Sinica, Munich International Library for Young People in Germany, the Department of International Studies of Macquarie University in Australia, and the Department of English at the University of Illinois in the US. She is a member of the International Society for the Studies of Children's Literature, as well as the director of the China Society For the Studies of Children's Literature and of the Foreign Society for the Studies of Children's Literature. She has presided over 8 national and provincial philosophy projects supported by National Social Science Foundation. Her academic monographs include The Pursuit of Poetry on the Edge: A Study on the Phenomenon of Modern Chinese Childhood Writing, Carving Childhood Time: A Probe into the History of Chinese Children's Films, Coordinates and Values: A Study of Chinese and Western Children's Literature and Field and Pattern: The New Map of Jiangsu Children's Literature, and she is the editor of The History of New Literature in Jiangsu Province: Children's Literature (three volumes). She has published nearly 100 Chinese and English papers in academic journals at home and abroad. Her papers have been published in CSSCI journals such as Modern Chinese Literature Studies, Contemporary Foreign Literature, Contemporary Writers Review, Jiangsu Social Sciences, the international academic journals in English such as International Research in Children's Literature (A&HCI) as well as foreign academic journals such as the Korean journal동아시아문화연구 (studies of east Asian cultures). Furthermore, many of her English publications have been included in books that are frontiers in children's literature by scholars in the United States, Norway, Australia, Malaysia, and other countries.
She has been involved in writing and translation in her spare time while also teaching and conducting scientific research. She has written many novels including Reading Seed and The Guardian Angel, as well as essay collections including Cambridge Rainbow·BroadnessⅠ and Cambridge Rainbow·BroadnessⅡ (co-written with Qingyue Sun). She has translated theoretical works of English children's literature and English children's novels and co-edited The Translation of Foreign Children's Literature Theory in the 21st Century with Professor Karen Coats of the University of Cambridge. She participated in the judging of “The National Excellent Children’s Literature Award”, “Chen Bochui International Children’s Literature Award(CICLA)”, “Cao Wenxuan Children’s Literature Price”, “Feng Zikai Children's Picture Books Award” and “Hsin Yi Picture Book Award”, and was recently selected as a judge for the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2024. She is committed to academic exchanges and cooperation between China and foreign countries in children's literature on the one hand, and to promoting the high-quality reading of children's literature worldwide.