Chinese Tales, or Qie Zhong Wen Zi in Chinese, a Spanish-Chinese book comprising 10 award-winning works from China's First National College Student Spanish Short Story Competition, is launched through a virtual conference on July 1, 2020. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

Chinese Tales, or Qie Zhong Wen Zi in Chinese, a Spanish-Chinese book comprising 10 award-winning works from China's First National College Student Spanish Short Story Contest, was launched Tuesday through a virtual conference.

The contest was co-organized in 2019 by the Beijing Foreign Studies University (BFSU), China's most prestigious university in foreign language teaching and foreign studies, and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), the best arts and humanities university in the Spanish-speaking world.

It's a platform created for Spanish majors in China "where they can express their creative talents in writing and translating their own short stories that can be read by the Spanish and Chinese-speaking public," according to its organizer UNAM, explaining the idea behind the contest.

Short stories in Spanish by 162 students from the country's 42 universities were submitted to the contest committee and the 10 winning pieces were translated into Chinese by their authors.

So far, China has more than 100 higher education institutions offering a degree in Hispanic literary or classical scholarship, with many featuring postgraduate programs.

BFSU Spanish professors Liu Jian and Xu Lei, and Mexican writers Rosa Beltrán, Hernán Lara and Adrián Curiel, comprised the contest jury.

Edited and published by National Autonomous University of Mexico Literature, one of the most important publishing houses in Spanish-speaking academia, Chinese Tales is also the first-ever Spanish-Chinese book published by the renowned publisher, introduced Guillermo Pulido, director of the UNAM office in China.