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China’s Mo Yan Wins Nobel Literature Prize China’s Mo Yan Wins Nobel Literature Prize
(about 2 hours later)
PARIS — The Swedish Academy announced on Thursday that it had awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature to Mo Yan, a Chinese author who was said to be “overjoyed and scared” when the Nobel organizers contacted him to say he had won the coveted award. LONDON — Mo Yan, a wildly prolific and internationally renowned Chinese author who considers himself nonpolitical but whose embrace by the ruling Communist Party has drawn criticism from dissident writers, was on Thursday awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature.
“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 García Márquez, at the same time finding a departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition,” the citation for the award declared, striking what seemed a careful balance after campaigns of vilification against other Chinese Nobel laureates. In his novels and short stories, Mr. Mo paints sprawling, intricate portraits of Chinese rural life, often using flights of fancy — animal narrators, the underworld, elements of fairy tales — that evoke the techniques of South American magical realists. His work has been widely translated and is readily available in the West, but he is perhaps best known abroad for “Red Sorghum” (1993) which takes on issues like the Japanese occupation, bandit culture and the harsh lives of rural Chinese, and which in 1987 was made into a movie directed by Zhang Yimou.
While his American audience has been limited, a film based on his novel “Red Sorghum” and directed by Zhang Yimou, was one of the most internationally acclaimed Chinese films, seen by millions. “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 García Márquez, at the same time finding a departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition,” the Swedish Academy said the citation that accompanied the award.
In addition to novels, Mo Yan has published short stories, essays on various topics, and “despite his social criticism is seen in his homeland as one of the foremost contemporary authors,” the citation said. Mr. Mo has not been shy of lacing his fiction with social criticism, but at the same time he carefully navigated whatever invisible line the government considers unacceptable. He has also appeared at times to embrace the establishment, and serves as vice chairman of the party-run Chinese Writers’ Association. Yet when the émigré novelist and critic Gao Xingjian won the literature prize in 2000 and was criticized for having given up his Chinese citizenship, Mr. Mo publicly defended him.
When the organizers contacted him, said Peter Englund, the secretary of the Swedish Academy, “he said he was overjoyed and scared,” The Associated Press reported, adding that China’s tightly controlled national television took the highly unusual step of breaking into a newscast to announce the award. He is the just the second Chinese citizen to win a Nobel; the first was the jailed dissident writer and political agitator Liu Xiaobo, who won the peace prize two years ago. But in contrast to the Chinese government’s anger over that award, which included refusing to allow Mr. Liu to accept it and exacting diplomatic penalties against Norway, the country that awards the peace prize, Beijing reacted to this one as an international vindication.
Mr. Mo was born in 1955 in Gaomi, China. The citation described him as a writer “who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary.” The announcement was celebrated on the China Central Television evening news broadcast, which took the unusual step of breaking into its regular news coverage for a special report. The populist state-run Global Times newspaper immediately placed a “special coverage” page, clearly prepared in advance, on its English-language Web site.
The name Mo Yan is a pseudonym for Guan Moye. He is the son of farmers who left school during the Cultural Revolution to work, first in agriculture and later in a factory, according to his Nobel biography. When the organizers contacted Mr. Mo, said Peter Englund, the secretary of the Swedish Academy, “he said he was overjoyed and scared,” The Associated Press reported.
In 1976 he joined the People’s Liberation Army and began to study literature and write. His first short story was published in a literary journal in 1981, the biography on the Nobel Web site said. The son of farmers, Mr. Mo was born in 1955 in Shandong Province, in the east, where much of his fiction is set. He became a teenager during the tumult of Cultural Revolution, leaving school to work first on a farm and then in a cottonseed oil factory. He began writing, he has said, a few years later while serving in the People’s Liberation Army. His first short story was published in 1981.
“In his writing Mo Yan draws on his youthful experiences and on settings in the province of his birth,” the biography said, referring to his 1987 novel published in English as “Red Sorghum” in 1993. The author’s given name is Guan Moye; Mo Yan, which means “don’t speak,” is actually a pen name that reflects, he has said, the time in which he grew up, a time when criticizing those in power could be ruinous.
His novel “The Garlic Ballads,” as it was called on its publication in English in 1995, and other works “have been judged subversive because of their sharp criticism of contemporary Chinese society.” “At that time in China, lives were not normal so my father and mother told me not speak outside,” he said during a cultural forum at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2011. “If you speak outside, and say what you think, you will get into trouble. So I listened to them and did not speak.”
Other works include “Big Breasts and Wide Hips” (1996), “Life and Death are Wearing Me Out” (2006) and “Sandalwood Death,” to be published in English in 2013. His most recent published work, called “Wa” in Chinese (2009) “illuminates the consequences of China’s imposition of a single-child policy.” Critics in the West have lavished praise on Mr. Mo. “Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out,” a huge, ambitious work narrated by five successive animals who are themselves reincarnations of a man controlled by Yama, the lord of the underworld, “covers almost the entire span of his country’s revolutionary experience,” almost like a documentary of the times, the Chinese scholar Jonathan Spence wrote in The New York Times in 2008.
 Mr. Mo was one of three writers tipped by bookmakers to break what critics had seen as a preponderance of European winners over the past decade. “Yet although one can say that the political dramas narrated by Mo Yan are historically faithful to the currently known record, ‘Life and Death’ remains a wildly visionary and creative novel, constantly mocking and rearranging itself and jolting the reader with its own internal commentary,” Mr. Spence wrote, calling the work “harsh and gritty, raunchy and funny.”
The prize is worth 8 million Swedish kronor, about $1.2 million. In its citation, the Swedish Academy noted that many of Mr. Mo’s works, including “The Garlic Ballads” (1995) and “The Republic of Wine” (2000) “have been judged subversive because of their sharp criticism of contemporary Chinese society.”
Since 1901, 104 Nobel literature prizes have been awarded, the most recent to Tomas Transtromer, a Swedish poet, whose more than 15 collections of poetry, the academy said last year, offered “condensed, translucent images” through which “he gives us fresh access to reality.” Other works include “Big Breasts and Wide Hips” (1996) — which was briefly banned before going on to become a huge best seller in China — and “Sandalwood Death,” to be published in English in 2013. Mr. Mo’s most recent published work, called “Wa” in Chinese (2009) “illuminates the consequences of China’s imposition of a single-child policy,” the academy said.
The Japanese author Haruki Murakami had been tipped by bookmakers as the most likely winner, but the panel selecting the winner prides itself on its inscrutability, keeping its deliberations secret for 50 years. Michel Hockx, professor of Chinese at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, said that Mr. Mo was part of a generation of post-Cultural Revolution writers who began looking at Chinese society, particularly in the countryside, through new, nonparty-line eyes.
The last American writer to win a Nobel in literature was Toni Morrison in 1993. Philip Roth has been a perennial favorite but has not been selected. “For a very long time Chinese realism was of a socialist realist persuasion, so it had to be filled with ideological and political messages,” Mr. Hockx said in an interview. “But instead of writing about socialist superheroes,” Mr. Mo has filled his work with real characters with real frailties, Mr. Hockx continued, while at the same time portraying rural China as a “magical place where wonderful things happened, things that seemed to come out of mythology and fairy tales.”
Nobel committees have announced prizes so far this week in physics, chemistry and medicine. The 2012 Nobel Peace laureate is to be named on Friday by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, and the prize in economics is to be announced on Monday by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. But fellow writers, especially those outside the establishment, mistrust Mr. Mo’s failure to take a political stand. Last summer, he was publicly attacked for joining a group of authors who transcribed by hand a 1942 speech by Mao Zedong. The speech, which ushered in decades of government control over Chinese writers and artists, has been described as a death warrant for those who refused to subsume their talents in the Communist Party.
He was also criticized for attending the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2009 after Beijing barred a number of dissident writers.
Mr. Mo later gave a speech at the fair that provided a window into his complex thinking.
“A writer should express criticism and indignation at the dark side of society and the ugliness of human nature, but we should not use one uniform expression,” he said. “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.”

Sarah Lyall reported from London and Andrew Jacobs from Beijing. Edward Wong contributed reporting from Beijing.