Nobel Prize in Literature 2012 for Chinese writer Mo Yan

October 11, 2012
________________________________________________________

Chinese writer Mo Yan is the new Nobel Prize for Literature 2012, and is the successor to the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer awarded by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm.

Mo Yan was born in Gaomi a poor county in the coastal province of Shandong, in February 1955.

The writer in characterized by his account of the China history in the last century, mixed with the rites and traditions of rural areas and the soul of the Chinese people by a realistic language, magic, descriptive, humanist and satirist, who was influenced, according to Yan, by Western writers as Tolstoy, Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez.

Among his best known works include: ‘The Garlic Ballads’ where a portrait of rural China, set in the early years of the reform process launched by Deng Xiaoping in late 1978, “Red Sorghum” (The Aleph , 2002), whose adaptation film director Zhang Yimou won the Golden Bear at Berlin in 1988; ‘Big breasts wide hips’ (Kailas, 2007), banned in China, which reviews the history of twentieth-century Chinese through the life of a woman, and ‘the republic of wine’, which satirizes government corruption and the country’s obsession with food and alcohol. The first three books were translated into Spanish.

For the first time, China can celebrate one of its citizens being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.