Chinese Writer Wins Nobel Literature Prize
October 11, 2012
Chinese author Mo Yan was awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in literature. In its announcement, the Nobel Prize committee said, “Through a mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspectives, Mo Yan has created a world reminiscent in its complexity of those in the writings of William Faulkner and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, at the same time finding a departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition.”
Mo Yan’s best-known novel in the West is Red Sorghum (1987). The narrative stretches across three generations, describing Chinese peasants fighting both Japanese invaders and each other during the 1930’s. The story is told through a series of flashbacks that depict events of great violence and brutality set against a landscape of delicate beauty.
Mo Yan’s fiction has made him a controversial personality in China and attracted the frequent disapproval of the Chinese government. His novel The Garlic Ballads (1988) portrays Communist Party officials as corrupt and cruel. The government reacted by refusing to allow the author to leave the country for a time. Mo Yan also faced government disapproval for his novel The Republic of Wine (1992), a satirical tale of corruption in Chinese society.
The narrator of the novel Big Breasts and Wide Hips (1996) is obsessed with women’s breasts. Some critics praised the narrator as one of Mo Yan’s most fascinating characters, but others attacked the novel as a humiliating attack on Chinese women, especially mothers. His many short stories have been published in such collections as Explosions and Other Stories (1991) and You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh (2001).
Mo Yan was born Guan Moye on February 17, 1955, though some sources give his birth year as 1956 or 1962. He was born in Shandong province and has set many of his stories near his hometown of Northeast Gaomi Township. Mo Yan joined the People’s Liberation Army at age 20 and began writing while he was a soldier. His first novel was Falling Rain on a Spring Night (1981). He chose the pen name Mo Yan, which means don’t speak, while writing the novel. He said he chose the name as a reminder to himself not to speak too much, a reference to the frank style that has aroused opposition from the authorities.
Additional World Book articles:
