2015 Taiwan Literature Award
2016 Golden Tripod Awards
1970s Hualien. The story starts when eighteen-year old waitress A-Hsia decides she is going to elope with the taciturn Pacilo, despite the fact that they barely know each other. Pacilo takes her back up the mountain and only then does she realise he is a woodcutter by trade. She decides to stay in the poor mountain community, and she and Pacilo resurrect a derelict local school. Together they encounter scars left by history, as well as many warm hearts.But only once the school is built are they really tested, and they are forced to reflect on what has brought them up into the mountains in the first place…
The Girl and the Woodcutter represents a new phase in Kan Yao-Ming’s creative output. His easy and unaffected prose brings to life the harsh realities of Taiwan’s mountain communities during a period of rapid development and social change. Itself a break in the history of the country, Kan’s writing is a perfect mixture of the realist and fantastical, a journey back that strikes right at our hearts in the present day.