BEIJING - China's former cultural minister Wang Meng, as well as a noted historian on the Qing Dynasty and 10 other people have won the "Awards for Excellent Chinese Biographic Works", a national prize selected and issued once every five years.

Wang, now 69, is awarded for an autobiography on his own life, which is full of ups and downs between the 1950s and 1980s.

Jia Yinghua is a very productive writer who has been known for his serial novels based on the real life of the family of Puyi, the last Qing emperor and a puppet "emperor" of the "Manchu State" under the invading Japanese troops during the 1930s and 40s.

Apart from the two prestigious writers, the majority of the prize-winners are newcomers in the country's literature circle. None of them thought they would have won the national award before they were acknowledged by the Biography Society of China (BSC).

One of the eye-attracting winners is translator Lu Yi, who has turned an English biography on Iris Chang (Zhang Chunru) into Chinese.