"Searching Among the Thorns" – Wei Tiancong

Wei Tiancong is a Taiwanese writer who published the classic magazine Bi hui (《筆匯》) and later, in 1966, also the Literary Quarterly (《文學季刊》). Both magazines brought together realist and modernist literature and became the cradle of many important Taiwanese writers.

In the 1970s, Wei Tiancong championed realist literature. He held that literature should turn toward life and society and portray people from all walks of life. He devoted himself to publishing magazines with great passion and had considerable influence from the 1950s to the 1980s.

At the age of eighty, Mr. Wei Tiancong published a new book, "Exploring Among the Thorns – My Reading Notes" (《荊棘中的探索──我的讀書札記》). It runs to almost six hundred pages and three hundred thousand characters, captures the hardships of life as well as an unceasing search and inquiry, and presents sixty years of the intellectual and scholarly journey of a lover of literature. In it, the author sums up his many years of reflections and observations on art, currents of thought, society and the state, from the classics to the modern era, from China to Taiwan and on to the whole world, and through the individual texts he paints the world of his ideals.

Everyone interested is warmly invited to the Prague Traditional Chinese Library, where you can borrow the book and, together with Wei Tiancong's text, discover the development of Taiwanese literature and thought!