Chinese fiction writer Mo Yan wins Nobel Prize in Literature
By Steven Moore,
In recent years, the Nobel Prize in Literature has often gone to deserving but little known and under-published writers, setting off a scramble to reissue whatever might be available. This year, fortunately, the prize has gone to a well-deserving and well-published writer: the wild man of Chinese fiction, Mo Yan, whose name means “Don’t speak.”
Announcing the prize Thursday morning, the Swedish Academy praised Mo’s “hallucinatory realism,” which “merges folk tales, history and the contemporary.” The prize is worth about $1.2 million.
This is the first Nobel Literature award that China can openly celebrate. The only previous Chinese writer to receive the literature prize was Gao Xingjian, but he had moved to France by the time he won in 2000. The Dalai Lama and Liu Xiaobo have won Nobel Peace Prizes, but both those awards infuriated Chinese officials and strained relations between Beijing and Norway.
Over the past 25 years, Mo Yan (born 1955) has been writing brutally vibrant stories about rural life in China that flout official Communist Party ideology and celebrate individualism. He also flouts literary conformity, spiking his earthy realism with fantasy and hallucination. Luckily for American readers, the majority of his flamboyant novels are available in translation, and a new one is forthcoming with the appealing title “Pow!”
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