By Naomi Kresge and Frederik Balfour
Mo Yan, the Chinese author, won the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature for blending folk tales, history and contemporary life with “hallucinatory realism,” the Swedish Academy said.
Mo Yan, 57, whose pen name in Chinese translates as “don’t speak” — or more colloquially, “shut up” — is the son of a coal miner. He grew up in a poor farming family in Gaomi township in Shandong, a place he draws inspiration from in many of his novels. His real name is Guan Moye.
He is the second Chinese author to win the prize: Gao Xingjian, who took French citizenship several years before, won in 2000. The award “confirms that Chinese literature really is part of the world’s literature,” Goran Malmqvist, a member of the Swedish Academy, told reporters in Stockholm.
“He is, as I see it, their greatest novelist,” Malmqvist said.
Mo Yan left school at age 10 to work. After the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, he became a writer for the People’s Liberation Army, leaving more than two decades later in 1997, said Howard Goldblatt, who has translated many of his books into English.
Goldblatt describes him as a “voracious reader and autodidact,” and a “born storyteller.” He says Mo Yan’s work would appeal to fans of both Francois Rabelais and Edgar Allen Poe, and that the Chinese author considers William Faulkner “his spiritual mentor.”
To evade China’s stiff censorship, Mo Yan often resorted to satire, such as in The Republic of Wine, which deals with China’s obsession with alcohol — and also dabbles in cannibalism — and in POW! which derides gluttony.
“He is very much a Jonathan Swift,” Goldblatt said in a telephone interview before the prize was announced. “Many of his novels have a fabulist quality to them. If absolute unalloyed realism is your thing, some novels won’t appeal.”
The first of Mo Yan’s books to be translated into English was Red Sorghum. It was made into a 1987 movie directed by Zhang Yimou.
Other works include the sprawling historical novel Big Breasts and Wide Hips, published in 1996; The Garlic Ballads in 1988; and Life and Death are Wearing Me Out in 2006. His most recent book, the 2009 Wa (“Frog”), looks at China’s one-child family policy through the eyes of a midwife.
Though Mo Yan’s international success has sent him on multiple tours of North America, Europe and the rest of Asia, he speaks only Chinese.
In a 2010 interview with Time Magazine, Mo Yan said he started writing to pull himself out of poverty. He told Time he was not worried about censorship, and now that he could “afford dumplings,” he kept writing because he had things to say.
Last year’s Nobel literature prize went to Tomas Transtromer, a Swedish poet and translator known for his depiction of nature and for his economy of form. Winners in the past decade have included Romanian-born novelist Herta Mueller in 2009 and Turkish author Orhan Pamuk in 2006.
The 8m krona ($1.2m) Nobel literature prize was created in the will of Alfred Nobel and first awarded in 1901. Nobel, a Swede who invented dynamite, also set up awards for achievements in medicine, physics, chemistry and peace. Balfour reported from Hong Kong. Contributors: Kim McLaughlin in Stockholm , Janina Pfalzer in Stockholm and Hephzibah Anderson in London.Reuters
