Oct. 11: Chinese national television today broke into its tightly scripted newscast to make a highly unusual announcement: Chinese writer Mo Yan has won the Nobel Prize in literature.
For a government that had disowned the only previous Chinese winner of the award — an exiled critic — today’s choice appeared to be a cause of pride.
Some of the books of Mo, who was once so destitute he ate tree bark and weeds to survive, have been banned as “provocative and vulgar” by Chinese authorities but he has also been criticised as being too close to the Communist Party.
While users of a popular Chinese microblogging site offered their congratulations, dissident artist Ai Weiwei said he disagreed with giving the award to a writer with the “taint of government” about him.
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”.
“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 declared, striking what seemed a careful balance after campaigns of vilification against other Chinese Nobel laureates.
Mo, born Guan Moye in 1955 to a farming family in eastern Shandong province, chose his pen-name 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.
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