The UCLA Department of Asian Languages & Cultures is pleased to announce that Professor Michael Berry, alongside author Fang Fang, have been awarded the 2025 Baifang Schell Award for Literature for the book The Running Flame (Columbia University Press, 2025). Berry and Fang’s other collaboration, the novel A Soft Burial (Columbia University Press, 2025) was also selected for the shortlist for the same prize. The Baifang Schell Award was established in 2024 to honor Liu Baifang Schell, who passed in 2021 after spending her life working to advance U.S.-China relations; the award is administered by China Books Review and the Asia Society.
According to the jury, “Fang Fang’s The Running Flame, inspired by the author’s interviews with female death row inmates, asks an impossible question: What could justify a woman killing her own husband? The novella offers a gripping, devastating and ethically complex exploration of the many ways that rural Chinese women have had their agency so circumscribed that murder becomes inevitable.” For more information about the Baifang Schell Prize and The Running Flame, please visit: https://chinabooksreview.com/2026/04/23/2025-winners/