China’s Mo Yan Wins Nobel Literature Prize

LONDON — Mo Yan, a wildly prolific and internationally renowned Chinese author who considers himself nonpolitical but whose embrace by the ruling Communist Party has drawn criticism from dissident writers, was on Thursday awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature.

In his novels and short stories, Mr. Mo paints sprawling, intricate portraits of Chinese rural life, often using flights of fancy — animal narrators, the underworld, elements of fairy tales — that evoke the techniques of South American magical realists. His work has been widely translated and is readily available in the West, but he is perhaps best known abroad for “Red Sorghum” (1987; published in English in 1993) which takes on issues like the Japanese occupation, bandit culture and the harsh lives of rural Chinese, and which in 1987 was made into a movie directed by Zhang Yimou.

“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,” the Swedish Academy said in the citation that accompanied the award.

Mr. Mo has not been shy of lacing his fiction with social criticism, but at the same time he has carefully navigated whatever invisible line the government considers unacceptable. He has also appeared at times to embrace the establishment, and serves as vice chairman of the party-run Chinese Writers’ Association. Yet when the émigré novelist and critic Gao Xingjian won the literature prize in 2000 and was criticized for having given up his Chinese citizenship, Mr. Mo publicly defended him.

He is the just the second Chinese resident citizen to win a Nobel; the first was the jailed dissident writer and political agitator Liu Xiaobo, who won the peace prize two years ago. But in contrast to the Chinese government’s anger over that award, which included refusing to allow Mr. Liu to accept it and exacting diplomatic penalties against Norway, the country that awards the peace prize, Beijing reacted to this one as an international vindication.

The announcement was celebrated on the China Central Television evening news broadcast, which took the unusual step of breaking into its regular news coverage for a special report. The populist state-run Global Times newspaper immediately placed a “special coverage” page, clearly prepared in advance, on its English-language Web site.

When the organizers contacted Mr. Mo, said Peter Englund, the secretary of the Swedish Academy, “he said he was overjoyed and scared,” The Associated Press reported.

The son of farmers, Mr. Mo was born in 1955 in Shandong Province, in the east, where much of his fiction is set. He became a teenager during the tumult of Cultural Revolution, leaving school to work first on a farm and then in a cottonseed oil factory. He began writing, he has said, a few years later while serving in the People’s Liberation Army. His first short story was published in 1981.

The author’s given name is Guan Moye; Mo Yan, which means “don’t speak,” is actually a pen name that reflects, he has said, the time in which he grew up, a time when criticizing those in power could be ruinous.

“At that time in China, lives were not normal so my father and mother told me not speak outside,” he said during a cultural forum at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2011. “If you speak outside, and say what you think, you will get into trouble. So I listened to them and did not speak.”

Critics in the West have lavished praise on Mr. Mo. “Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out,” a huge, ambitious work narrated by five successive animals who are themselves reincarnations of a man controlled by Yama, the lord of the underworld, “covers almost the entire span of his country’s revolutionary experience,” almost like a documentary of the times, the Chinese scholar Jonathan Spence wrote in The New York Times in 2008.

“Yet although one can say that the political dramas narrated by Mo Yan are historically faithful to the currently known record, ‘Life and Death’ remains a wildly visionary and creative novel, constantly mocking and rearranging itself and jolting the reader with its own internal commentary,” Mr. Spence wrote, calling the work “harsh and gritty, raunchy and funny.”

In its citation, the Swedish Academy noted that many of Mr. Mo’s works, including “The Garlic Ballads” (1988, published in English in 1995) and “The Republic of Wine” (1992, published in English in 2000) “have been judged subversive because of their sharp criticism of contemporary Chinese society.”

Other works include “Big Breasts and Wide Hips” (1996, published in English in 2004) — which was briefly banned before going on to become a huge best seller in China — and “Sandalwood Death” (2004, to be published in English in 2013). Mr. Mo’s most recent published work, called “Wa” in Chinese (2009) “illuminates the consequences of China’s imposition of a single-child policy,” the academy said.

Michel Hockx, professor of Chinese at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, said that Mr. Mo was part of a generation of post-Cultural Revolution writers who began looking at Chinese society, particularly in the countryside, through new, nonparty-line eyes.

“For a very long time Chinese realism was of a socialist realist persuasion, so it had to be filled with ideological and political messages,” Mr. Hockx said in an interview. “But instead of writing about socialist superheroes,” Mr. Mo has filled his work with real characters with real frailties, Mr. Hockx continued, while at the same time portraying rural China as a “magical place where wonderful things happened, things that seemed to come out of mythology and fairy tales.”

But fellow writers, especially those outside the establishment, mistrust Mr. Mo’s failure to take a political stand. Last summer, he was criticized for joining a group of authors who transcribed by hand a 1942 speech by Mao Zedong. The speech, which ushered in decades of government control over Chinese writers and artists, has been described as a death warrant for those who refused to subsume their talents in the Communist Party.

He was also criticized for attending the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2009 after Beijing barred a number of dissident writers.

Mr. Mo later gave a speech at the fair that provided a window into his complex thinking.

“A writer should express criticism and indignation at the dark side of society and the ugliness of human nature, but we should not use one uniform expression,” he said. “Some may want to shout on the street, but we should tolerate those who hide in their rooms and use literature to voice their opinions.”

Sarah Lyall reported from London and Andrew Jacobs from Beijing. Edward Wong contributed reporting from Beijing.

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