‘Overjoyed’ Mo Yan welcomes Nobel prize

Beijing: Chinese author Mo Yan said on Thursday he was delighted at winning this year’s Nobel prize for literature, as millions in China expressed pride and state media upheld his achievement as an honour for the country.

Mo Yan, 57, became the first Chinese national to win the prize, and the initial official reaction indicated it would be held up as a victory for China in sharp contrast to Beijing’s angry response to the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize for dissident Liu Xiaobo.

“On hearing the news that I won the award, I was very happy,” Mo Yan was quoted saying by the official China News Service.

“I will focus on creating new works. I will strive harder to thank everyone.”

The Swedish Academy which announced the award in Stockholm said Mo Yan was honoured for using “a mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspectives” to create “a world reminiscent in its complexity of those in the writings of William Faulkner and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.”

He is one of China’s leading writers, known for works that explored the brutality and darkness of 20th-century Chinese society with a cynical wit in a highly prolific career.

Mo Yan, a pen name for the author, who was born Guan Moye, is perhaps best-known abroad for his 1987 novella Red Sorghum, a tale of the brutal violence that plagued the eastern China countryside — where he grew up — during the 1920s and 30s.

The story was later made into an acclaimed film by leading Chinese director Zhang Yimou.

The Nobel literature award is often dismissed in China as Western-focused, but users of the country’s hugely popular microblogging services broadly welcomed the win as triumph for Chinese literature.

It was the most discussed topic on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, with almost three million web-users posting messages within two hours of the announcement.

“Mo Yan winning is his personal honour, but also the honour of Chinese literature,” said one posting.

“For Mo Yan to win the Nobel prize is the greatest thing for so many Chinese people. It really is a dream,” said another.

State media said he was at his home in the countryside of Shandong province, where many of his works are set.

The Nobel Academy’s permanent secretary, Peter Englund, said the organisation had spoken to Mo Yan by telephone at his home and the author was “overjoyed and terrified” at the award.

The Nobel awards are a sensitive issue in China since jailed dissident writer Liu Xiaobo won the Peace Prize in 2010 for his advocacy of democratic change in the country.

China lashed out, refusing to let Liu attend the award ceremony in Oslo, vilifying the Norwegian committee that chooses the awards as “clowns” and punishing Norway’s government with diplomatic retaliation.

Liu remains in prison and his wife under house arrest to prevent her discussing his situation.

Mo Yan’s subject matter has often flirted with the line separating what is acceptable and what is considered politically taboo by the ruling Communist Party.

His latest novel, 2009’s Frog, for example, is a searing depiction of China’s “one child” population control policy and the local officials who ruthlessly implement it with forced abortions and sterilisations.

Some of his novels, including Frog, sold out in bookshops and Chinese online booksellers ahead of the announcement, according to state media.

Mo Yan, however, has deftly managed to avoid serious trouble with Communist authorities, in part due to his position as a deputy chairman of the writers association.

He Jianming, the writer’s association official, said: “I feel happy because Mo Yan is a good friend of ours.”

China’s government was highly critical of the literature prize awarded to author Gao Xingjian in 2000, the first Chinese-language writer to win the award. Gao had fled China in the 1980s and took French citizenship in 1997.

Beijing also loudly denounced the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama in 1989.