Chinese fiction writer Mo Yan wins Nobel Prize in Literature

In recent years, the Nobel Prize in Literature has often gone to deserving but little-known and under-published writers, setting off a scramble to reissue whatever might be available. This year, fortunately, the prize has gone to a well-deserving and well-published writer: the wild man of Chinese fiction, Mo Yan, whose pen name means “Don’t speak.”

Announcing the prize Thursday morning, the Swedish Academy praised Mo Yan’s “hallucinatory realism,” which “merges folk tales, history and the contemporary.” The prize is worth about $1.2 million.

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2012 Nobel laureates: The Nobel Prize for literature was announced Thursday. Winners for medicine, physics and chemistry were announced earlier this week. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday, and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences will follow on Monday.

This is the first Nobel literature award that China can openly celebrate. The only previous Chinese writer to receive the literature prize was Gao Xingjian, but he had moved to France by the time he won in 2000. The Dalai Lama and Liu Xiaobo have won Nobel Peace Prizes, but both those awards infuriated Chinese officials and strained relations between Beijing and Norway.

Over the past 25 years, Mo Yan (born in 1955 as Guan Moye) has been writing brutally vibrant stories about rural life in China that flout official Communist Party ideology and celebrate individualism. He also flouts literary conformity, spiking his earthy realism with fantasy and hallucination. Luckily for American readers, the majority of his flamboyant novels are available in translation, and a new one is forthcoming with the appealing title “Pow!”

Like many in his generation, Mo Yan experienced a tough upbringing: Born on a farm, he worked in a factory before joining the army, where he began writing. After that, he became a teacher in the People’s Liberation Army’s Cultural Academy and published his first novel in the early 1980s. His second novel, “Red Sorghum” (1986), was adapted for film by director Zhang Yimou.

Mo Yan’s American translator, Howard Goldblatt, describes the Chinese writer as a quiet and thoughtful autodidact. “He’s very socially aware, and he’s got a strong social conscience,” Gold­blatt said by phone from his home in Indiana. “He’s very interested in Chinese society, in its good and bad forms. Controversy rages around him, but it no longer bothers him. He must have so much going on in his head that he doesn’t have time to deal with the outside world.

“Like everyone else writing in China, he knows the rules,” Gold-blatt said, “and the rules are flexible enough that he can write about anything so long as he doesn’t touch the three T’s: Tibet, Taiwan and Tiananmen.”

After publishing translations of five novels by Mo Yan, with two more coming soon, Goldblatt describes the writer’s work as Dickensian. “He’s bawdy when he wants to be. Big and bold, lots of adjectives, and long sentences. The visuality is incredible. When he describes a scene, he does it with every tool in his box. He turns things on their head and makes them be something they could never be in real life. In Mo Yan’s hands, even the most horrific scenes have a great beauty to them.”

A sense of Mo Yan’s work emerges from the titles alone: “The Garlic Ballads,” “Explosions and Other Stories,” “The Republic of Wine,” “Shifu: You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh,” and “Big Breasts and Wide Hips” (all published in the 1990s).