Mo Yan

The entire nation overflowed with excitement as a Chinese author was pronounced the winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm on October 11.

“I was very glad when I heard about the news. But I think it doesn’t mean much,” said the new Nobel laureate Mo Yan, in his typical calm manner.

Born in 1955, Mo Yan grew up in Gaomi, a small, sleepy town in Shandong province in north-eastern China. He began to study literature and write in 1976 when he joined the People's Liberation Army.

In his writing, he draws on his youthful experiences and on settings in the province of his birth, as evidenced by his novel Red Sorghum that unfolds in several turbulent decades of 20th century China. The novel later became a hugely successful film, thanks to the Chinese director Zhang Yimou.

The novelist's “hallucinatory realism” merges folk tales, history and the contemporary, creating a world reminiscent of those forged by William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, said the Swedish Academy, which decides on the award.

His other works include Fengru feitun (Big Breasts and Wide Hips), a broad historical fresco portraying 20th-century China through the microcosm of a single family; Shengsi pilao (Life and Death are Wearing Me Out), a subtle description of everyday life and the violent transmogrifications in the young People's Republic; and Wa (in French Grenouilles), which illuminates the consequences of China's imposition of family-control policies.