China’s Mo Yan wins 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature

mangaloretoday.com/ DHNS

Stockholm, Oct 11 :  Chinese writer Mo Yan, "who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary", Thursday won the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy announced.

Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy in Stockholm, made the announcement.

 

According to the Nobel Prize website, Mo was born in 1955 in China’s Shandong province. In 1976, he joined the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), and during this time he began to study literature and write.

As a 12-year-old, he left school to work first in agriculture, and later in a factory. His parents were farmers. His first short story was published in a literary journal in 1981.
His breakthrough came a few years later with the novella "Touming de hong luobo" in 1986.

In his writing, Mo draws on his youthful experiences and on settings in the province of his birth. He grew up in Gaomi.

This is apparent in his novel "Hong gaoliang jiazu" in 1987 (in English "Red Sorghum", 1993). The book consists of five stories that unfold and interweave in Gaomi in several turbulent decades in the 20th century.

The novel "Tiantang suantai zhi ge" in 1988 (in English "The Garlic Ballads" 1995), and his satirical "Jiuguo" in 1992 (in English "The Republic of Wine" 2000) have been judged subversive because of their sharp criticism of contemporary Chinese society.
The 2011 literature prize went to Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer.

Alfred Nobel, a Swedish industrialist who invented dynamite, established the Nobel Prizes in his will in 1895. The first awards were handed out six years later.

The award ceremony will be held Dec 10, Xinhua reported. The winner will be given a medal, a diploma and a cash award of eight million Swedish Kronor (about $1 million).