Mo Yan Wins Nobel Prize in Literature

If you had Chinese write Mo Yan in your Nobel Prize in Lit pool, you’re a winner, winner, chicken dinner! The writer, whose actual name is Guan Moye (Mo Yan means “don’t speak” in Chinese), had been one of the favorites — an 8/1 shot according to Ladbrokes’ odds, as of yesterday. Hey, we told you it was solid bet!

The 57-year-old Mo Yan, who takes home 8 million kronor, or about $1.2 million, is the first Chinese national to win the prize, though in 2000 Gao Xingjian, a Chinese-born-but-French-citizen won the Prize. The Nobel committee chose Mo Yan because he is a writer “who with halluncinatory realism merges folk tales, history and contemporary.” Furthermore, “through a mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspectives, Mo Yan has created a world reminiscent in its complexity of those in the writings of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, at the same time finding a departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition.”

According to a profile of Mo Yan in Time in 2010, Mo Yan sets much of his fiction — including what he refers to as his magnum opus, a tome titled Big Breasts and Wide Hips— in the past to avoid “stirring up the animosity of the country’s ever vigilant censors.” His 1987 novel Red Sorghum was a breakthrough. The story, which is set in the 1930s and chronicles a woman sent to marry the owner of a winery, was adapted to film, and won first prize at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1998. Another of Mo Yan’s novels, Frog, examines the effects of China’s controversial one-child policy. Many of Mo Yan’s novels and volumes of short stories are available in English.