11 October, 2012 should be a memorable day for China when Peter Englund, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, announced the Chinese writer Mo Yan “who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary,” to be the winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature.
It is the first time that a Chinese writer has won this prize and the announcement brought an explosion of pride across Chinese national and social media. Li Changchun, the China’s top propaganda official, the Foreign Ministry, China Writers Association and a number of celebrities and local organizations congratulated Mo Yan on his winning.
The prize of 8m kronor (￡744.000) will be awarded at a ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December.
On the same day, Mo Yan held a press conference at his hometown Gaomi in Shandong province in eastern China. During the interview, the new Nobel laureate said he was “overjoyed and scared” when he was informed of the prize by phone 20 minutes before the official announcement and he will try not to be influenced by the honor and do what he should do.
Mo Yan had been predicted by many Chinese media to have the most potential to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012, the well-known Japanese writer Haruki Murakami being his most competitive counterpart.
Born in 1955, Mo Yan is a renowned author of contemporary Chinese literature. “He is writing about the peasantry, mainly about the life in the countryside, about ordinary people struggling to survive, struggling for their dignity, sometimes winning but most of the time losing,” said permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy Peter Englund, when interviewed by the freelance journalist Sven Hugo Persson. “The basis for his books was laid when as a child he listened to all these Chinese folktales. The term magical realism has been used about his work, but I think that is a sort of belittling him because that isn’t something he’s picked up from Gabriel García Márquez, but he has done something that is quite unique. With the supernatural going in to the ordinary reality, he’s an extremely skillful narrator.”
Peter Englund also recommended starting to get to know Mo Yan’s works with The Garlic Ballads which “is a novel based on true incidents in the 1980s in China where riots happened due to a blast in the garlic market”. ”That is just a center piece for a big story involving a lot of different people. He’s not only writing about history, but he is also writing about contemporary China,” he added.
Mo’s representative works include Wa (currently untranslated, 2009), Shengsi Pilao (Life and Death are Wearing Me Out, 2006), Jiu Guo (Republic of Wine,2005), Fengru Feitun (Big Breasts and Wide Hips,1996), Hong Gaoliang Jiazu (Red Sorghum: A Novel of China,1987) etc., of which Hong Gaoliang Jiazu was adapted to an internationally successful movie directed by Zhang Yimou and in 2011 Wa enabled him to win Mao Dun Literature Prize which is one of the most prestigious literature prizes in China, awarded every four years. Dozens of his works have been translated into English, French and Japanese and many other languages.
In history, there were several other Chinese authors nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but none of them won the prize. The nominated writers include Lao She (1968), Lin Yutang (1975), Shen Congwen (1988), Ba Jin (2001) etc.. Lao She and Shen Congwen were said to have the biggest chance to win the prize in 1968 and 1988 respectively and what failed them was that they had died at that time. Normally, as the prize rules state, the prize is not awarded posthumously.
The very first Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded in 1901 to the French poet and philosopher Sully Prudhomme, who in his poetry showed the ”rare combination of the qualities of both heart and intellect”. Since then, it has been awarded annually with the will of Alfred Nobel to the person “who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction …” Last year’s literature prize went to Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer.
Although praised by many people, Mo Yan has become a controversial figure among some human rights activists and dissidents who have denounced the award as intended to appease Beijing, which lashed out in 2010 over the Nobel Peace Prize won by jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo. This award also ignited renewed criticisms of Mo from other writers as having closely attached to the ruling Communist Party and being too willing to serve or too timid to confront a government that heavily censors artists and authors, and punishes those who refuse to obey.
US-based dissident Wei Jingsheng, prominent leader of China’s democracy movement, praised Mo Yan’s skill as a writer but questioned his actions including copying by hand part of a speech by late leader Mao Zedong for a commemorative book which contained the leader’s views on how art should serve the communist cause, according to news agency Agence France-Presse.
Following the announcement, Mo Yan’s works draw much attention from the journalists and visitors at the 64th Frankfurt Book Fair in Frankfurt, western Germany on 11 October, 2012.
On the whole, Mo Yan’s achievement signifies that Chinese literature has, for the first time, been universally accepted and may play an important role in world literature in the future. This success not only encourages Chinese people to renewably pay attention to Chinese literature which has been on the wane for a long time, but also offers an access for people in other countries to know about and to understand Chinese literature.
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