The Guardian
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 …
