🇨🇳 Huang Tanchen

Huang was born on 12 September 2015 in China. The novel that carries the record is 《甩锅侠行星寻宝记》 — rendered by Guinness as Shirk man's treasure hunt on planets — published by Guangzhou Press in October 2023 under ISBN 978-7-5462-3635-3. It is science fiction, built around the adventures of two anthropomorphic hermit crabs in what he calls the Shuaiguoxia universe, a setting that folds factual material into a fantasy narrative.

The origin of the book is a promise. Guinness records that at the age of seven he told his parents he would write at least three thousand words a day, and that the novel took him more than a year to finish. Three thousand words a day is a professional novelist's pace; sustained for a year by a seven-year-old, it is the whole explanation of how a child arrives at a 40,000-word manuscript.

The adjudication took place on 10 May 2025 at the Shimofang studio in Guangzhou, with the Guinness adjudicator Ye Chuangwei present. Chinese media reported the on-site declaration: that the book had been published in October 2023, when the author was eight years and forty-nine days old, and that the attempt had succeeded. Coverage ran the same week on the state broadcaster CNR and in Guangzhou Daily.

By the time the record was verified he had completed two full-length novels totalling more than two hundred thousand characters. In 2024 he received the top "Star of Role-Model Spirit" award in the second national "Kaimo Cup" youth series of activities.

The preface to the novel was written by the sprinter Su Bingtian, who congratulated him on the record and expressed the hope that he would keep running in the field he loves — that he would run a spiritual marathon with the tip of his pen, fast, steady, far and happily. It is an unusual pairing, an Olympic sprinter introducing a child's science-fiction novel, and it says something about how the achievement was received in China: as a feat of endurance rather than of precocity.

Guinness World Records treats authorship records with more suspicion than most categories, because the claim is so easy to inflate. Self-published work, ghost-assisted manuscripts and picture books all fail the criteria; the organisation requires a published work of at least forty thousand words, issued by a publisher, with documentary evidence of the publication date and the author's date of birth. The result is a record that changes hands rarely.

China's children's publishing market is among the largest in the world, and a state-linked media environment amplifies youth achievement in a way that few other countries match. That combination — a large domestic publishing industry and national coverage of individual young achievers — explains why a record adjudicated in a Guangzhou studio reached the national broadcaster within two days.

Guinness maintains the youngest-published-novelist records separately for male and female authors, which is why the title he holds is specifically the male record. The distinction is the organisation's, not a description of the field.