Helen Wang


Helen Kay Wang is an English sinologist and translator. She works as curator of East Asian Money at the British Museum in London. She has also published a number of literary translations from Chinese, including an award-winning translation of a Chinese children's book.

Biography

Wang has a BA in Chinese from SOAS University of London. She has a PhD in archaeology from University College London, titled "Money on the Silk Road: the evidence from Eastern Central Asia to c. AD 800", 2002.
In 1991 Wang joined the British Museum staff as an assistant to Joe Cribb in the Asian section of the Department of Coins and Medals. She became Curator of East Asian Money in 1993. Her work mostly relates to the collections for which she is responsible, collection history and development of the field, in particular East Asian numismatics, Silk Road Numismatics, Sir Aurel Stein and his collections, and textiles as money. She was joint Honorary Secretary of the Royal Numismatic Society from 2011-2016, Hon. Vice President from 2018, and is an honorary member of the editorial board of Zhongguo Qianbi 《中国钱币》, the journal of the China Numismatic Society. She was elected as an individual member of the International Association for the Study of Silk Road Textiles in 2016. In 2017, she started a web-resource .
Wang was married to Chinese archaeologist Wang Tao, with whom she has two children.

Literary translations

Wang's first published literary translations were in the early 1990s - short stories and essays by Yu Hua, Zhang Chengzhi, Ma Yuan, Du Ma and Zhang Langlang. After a long break, she returned to translation in the 2010s, translating more short stories, essays and children's books. She also works collaboratively with the , , . In 2016, she co-founded the group with Anna Gustafsson Chen and . From 2012-2015 she was a Member of the Committee of the Translators Association. She has been on the judging panel of four of the Project's Bai Meigui Chinese translation competitions.

Awards and commendations