{"id":599,"date":"2012-10-12T06:55:47","date_gmt":"2012-10-12T06:55:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sanghiya.com\/?p=599"},"modified":"2012-10-12T08:05:16","modified_gmt":"2012-10-12T08:05:16","slug":"chinese-author-mo-yan-wins-nobel-prize-for-literature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sanghiya.com\/?p=599","title":{"rendered":"Chinese author Mo Yan wins Nobel Prize for Literature"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chinese author Mo Yan has been awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize for literature.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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A prolific author, Mo has published dozens of short stories, with his first work published in 1981.<\/p>\n

The Swedish Academy praised his work which “with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, \u00a0history and the contemporary”.<\/p>\n

The 57-year-old is the first Chinese resident to win the prize. Chinese-born Gao Xingjian was \u00a0 \u00a0honoured in 2000, but is a French citizen.<\/p>\n

Mo is the 109th recipient of the prestigious prize, won last year by Swedish poet Tomas Transtroemer.<\/p>\n

Presented by the Nobel Foundation, the award – only given to living writers – is worth 8 million kronor (\u00a3741,000).<\/p>\n

“He has such a unique way of writing. If you read half a page of Mo Yan you immediately recognise it as him,” said Peter Englund, head of the Academy.<\/p>\n

He said Mo had been told of the award, adding: “He was at home with his dad. He said he was overjoyed and terrified.”<\/p>\n

Born Guan Moye, the author writes under the pen name Mo Yan, which means “don’t speak” in Chinese.<\/p>\n

He began writing while a soldier in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and received international fame in 1987 for Red Sorghum: A Novel of China.<\/p>\n

Made into a film which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1988, the novella was a tale of the brutal violence in the eastern China countryside where he grew up during the 1920s and 1930s.<\/p>\n

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Secretary of the Swedish Academy, Peter Englund, announced the award<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Favouring to write about China’s past rather than contemporary issues, the settings for Mo’s works range from the 1911 revolution, Japan’s wartime invasion and Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution.<\/p>\n

“He has a very impressive oeuvre,” Michel Hockx, Professor of Chinese at the University of London, said.<\/p>\n

“He has a large readership and he addresses the human condition in a way in which the Nobel Committee likes to see.”<\/p>\n

Mo’s other acclaimed works include Republic of Wine, Life And Death Are Wearing Me Out and Big Breasts and Wide Hips.<\/p>\n

The latter book caused controversy when it was published in 1995 for its sexual content and depicting a class struggle contrary to the Chinese Communist Party line.<\/p>\n

The author was forced by the PLA to withdraw it from publication although it was pirated many times.<\/p>\n

After it was translated into English a decade later, the book won him a nomination for the Man Asian Literary Prize.<\/p>\n

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Chinese people react to the news that writer Mo Yan has won the 2012 Nobel Prize for literature<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Despite his social criticism Mo is seen in his homeland as one of the foremost contemporary authors, however critics have accused him of being too close to the Communist Party.<\/p>\n

“A writer should express criticism and indignation at the dark side of society and the ugliness of human nature,” the author said in a speech at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2009.<\/p>\n

“Some may want to shout on the street, but we should tolerate those who hide in their rooms and use literature to voice their opinions.”<\/p>\n

His latest novel, Frog, about China’s “one child” population control policy, won the Mao Dun Literature Prize – one of his country’s most prestigious literature prizes – last year.<\/p>\n

Mo and the other Nobel laureates for medicine, physics, chemistry and peace, will receive their prizes at formal ceremonies in Stockholm and Oslo on 10 December – the anniversary of the death of prize creator Alfred Nobel in 1896.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chinese author Mo Yan has been awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize for literature. A prolific author, Mo has published dozens of short stories, with his first work published in 1981. The Swedish Academy praised...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":629,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"modified_by":"\u0938\u0941\u0930\u0947\u0928\u094d\u0926\u094d\u0930 \u0907\u0919\u094d\u0928\u093e\u092e","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sanghiya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sanghiya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sanghiya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sanghiya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sanghiya.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=599"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.sanghiya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":602,"href":"https:\/\/www.sanghiya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599\/revisions\/602"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sanghiya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/629"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sanghiya.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sanghiya.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sanghiya.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}