Writing Across Taiwan and Macau

Chiao-Jung Chen’s The Thousand-Year Itch. Staged reading at the 2025 Prologue New Play Festival. Photo by Aaron Liau.

It’s very hard to define Chiao-Jung Chen as one kind of artist, for she is someone who works fluidly across genres. She has worked as a playwright, a librettist, and a lyricist on various productions for the past ten years, with her plays and musicals being staged in both Macau and Taiwan. Outside the theatre, she is a comics writer whose work Sea You There and Us has garnered a worldwide fanbase. Her versatility makes any attempt to confine her to a single title seem blasphemous of her devotion to storytelling.

However, she has just received one of the most prestigious awards in Taiwan as a playwright. She was named the winner of the 2025 Taiwan Literature Award for Playwriting for The Thousand-Year Itch in July, and the play met its Taiwanese audience for the first time through a staged reading at the Prologue New Play Festival in November. Prior to the show, Kuan-Ting Lin, the literary manager at the Prologue Center for New Plays, sat down with Chen to look back on her major works and share insights into life as a playwright moving across Taiwan and Macau.

(Read the full article here.)