Novelist, the first ever Chinese literature Nobel laureate, praised for 'hallucinatory realism'
Chinese author Mo Yan,
who left school for a life working the fields at the age of 12, has
become the first Chinese citizen ever to win the Nobel prize in
literature, praised by the Swedish Academy for merging "folk tales,
history and the contemporary" with "hallucinatory realism".
The
win makes Mo Yan the first Chinese citizen to win the Nobel in its
111-year history: although Gao Xingjian won in 2000, and was born in
China,
he is now a French citizen; and although Pearl Buck took the prize in
1938, for "her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China
and for her biographical masterpieces", she is an American author.
The
Nobel, worth eight million kronor, goes to the writer "who shall have
produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an
ideal direction", with previous winners including Samuel Beckett, Doris
Lessing and, last year, the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer. Over the
past month
the Chinese press has become increasingly vocal about the possibility of a Chinese writer taking the award, with commentors equating "bagging the prize to
Chinese literature gaining the world's recognition".
With
the Nobel going to a European seven times in the last decade, all
evidence was pointing to a winner from outside Europe, and Japanese
novelist Haruki Murakami emerged as the frontrunner at betting firm
Ladbrokes. Mo Yan, at 9/1, "definitely slipped under the radar", said
the firm's spokesman Alex Donohue.
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| Translator: Howard Goldblatt |
Born in 1955 to parents
who were farmers, Mo Yan - a pseudonym for Guan Moye; the pen name means
"don't speak" - grew up in Gaomi in Shandong province in north-eastern
China. The cultural revolution forced him to leave school at 12, and he
went to work in the fields, completing his education in the army. He
published his first book in 1981, but found literary success in 1987
with Hong gaoliang jiazu (Red Sorghum), a novel that
an internationally successful movie by director Zhang Yimou, set against the horrific events that unfolded as Japan invaded China in the 1930s.
"He
writes about the peasantry, about life in the countryside, about 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, announcing the win. "The basis for his books was
laid when as a child he listened to folktales. The
description
magical realism has been used about him, but I think that is belittling
him – this isn't something he's picked up from Gabriel García Márquez,
but something which is very much his own. With the supernatural going in
to the ordinary, he's an extremely original narrator."
Informing
Mo Yan of his win today, Englund said the author, who was at the home
in China where he lives with his 90-year-old father – was "overjoyed and
scared".
Please go to
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Currently, there are a surprising number of sequential adaptations of
prose works, faithful and otherwise, available to readers seeking
something other than the super-heroic serial adventures that have
dominated the American market for the past half century. One could even
argue that we’re in the midst of a Renaissance, if not a dawning Golden
Age, of graphic novels based upon titles drawn from the Western canon
and genre literature. However, the key term—and primary emphasis—in that
statement would have to be upon the word “Western,” since the majority
of these books were inspired by works originally written in English.
