Literary Nobel Goes to Chinese Author Mo Yan

Writer's work 'oft-banned, widely pirated'

By Matt Cantor, Newser Staff

Posted Oct 11, 2012 6:47 AM CDT

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Literary Nobel Goes to Chinese Author Mo Yan — In this photo taken Sunday, March 25, 2012, Chinese writer Mo Yan attends a novel writing competition as a judge, in south China's Hainan province. (AP Photo)

Applauding the "hallucinatoric realism" of his work, the Swedish Academy has awarded China's Mo Yan the Nobel Prize for Literature. The author "merges folk tales, history, and the contemporary," judges said. Time magazine has called Mo "one of the most famous, oft-banned, and widely pirated of all Chinese writers," the Guardian reports. Four of the past five awards have gone to European authors, the AP notes; last year, Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer took the prize, worth $1.2 million. Planning on perusing Mo's work? Try The Garlic Ballads, says an Academy member. (More literature stories.)