Chinese writer Mo Yan wins Nobel prize for literature

    10月11日，瑞典文学院宣布，中国作家莫言获2012年诺贝尔文学奖，授奖辞为“莫言将魔幻现实主义融合了民间故事、历史与当代社会”。莫言原名管谟业，1955年出生于山东高密县农一个农民家庭，在写部小说时为自己取了笔名＂莫言＂。

Chinese writer Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday, a cause of pride for a government that had disowned the only previous Chinese winner of the award, an exiled critic.

The Swedish Academy, which selects the winners of the prestigious award, praised Mo’s “hallucinatory realism” saying it “merges folk tales, history and the contemporary.”

Peter Englund, the academy’s permanent secretary, described Mo as a poet.

“He is sort of a poet when it comes to describing nature. And on top of that, these different spheres with the magical and the supernatural going into each other in a very, very?in a way, you really believe it,” he said.

Born Guan Moye in 1955 to a farming family in eastern Shandong province, Mo chose his penname while writing his first novel.

Garrulous by nature, Mo has said the name, meaning “don’t speak,” was intended to remind him to hold his tongue lest he get himself into trouble and to mask his identity since he began writing while serving in the army.

According to Englund all of his 11 novels are set in his hometown.

“He is always writing about the North Eastern Gaomi county where he was born and when I phoned him, he was there, living with his father. He is writing about the same patch of land and based on very much the tales that he heard old people talking about when he was a boy,” he said.

Englund said that he had called Mo before the prize was announced and spoken to him through a translator.

“He said that he was overjoyed and scared and yes, he is coming to Stockholm,” Englund said.

Among the works highlighted by the Nobel judges were “Red Sorghum” (1993), “The Garlic Ballads” (1995), “Big Breasts & Wide Hips” (2004).

“If you want to start off to get a sense of his writing and also get a sense of his moral core in what he is writing, I would recommend the ‘Garlic Ballads’.”

Chinese social media exploded with pride after the announcement, while Mo’s publisher called it a dream come true but said that Mo always played down the importance of prizes.

The award was almost certain to be welcomed in China, unlike when jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, which infuriated China. That was the last time a Chinese national won a Nobel Prize.

“I am proud of him as a Chinese. I saw the news just now. The Nobel Prize is a world class prize. He is great. I am so happy for him,” said Zheng Qingcheng, an Chinese reader at a bookstore in Beijing.

The communist leadership also disowned the Nobel when Gao Xingjian won the literature award in 2000 for his absurdist dramas and inventive fiction. Gao’s works are laced with criticisms of China’s communist government and have been banned in China.

According to Bjorn Wiman, a literature writer for the Swedish newspaper “Dagens Nyherter” the award to Mo came as a surprise.

“Complete surprise. Although Mo Yan was on the lists of the betting companies and so on I didn’t really believe this,” he said.

European authors had won four of the past five awards, with last year’s prize going to Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer.

As with the other Nobel Prizes, the prize is worth 8 (m) million kronor, or about 1.2 (m) million US dollars.