Chinese author, Mo Yan is 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature

Mo Yan has been declared winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm on Thursday.

Peter Englund, Permanent Secretary of the academy made the announcement. Englund noted Yan as using “hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary." The award ceremony will be held on Dec. 10.

Last year, Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer won the prize.

Established by Alfred Nobel, a Swedish industrialist who invented dynamite, the Nobel Prizes are regarded as the most prestigious in in the world.

Mo Yan was born in 1955 of farmers parents and grew up in Gaomi in Shandong province, eastern China.

Mo Yan

His book, Red Sorghum, 1993 (Hong Gaoliang Jiazu, 1987) won him the prestigious prize. The Academy stated: "In his writing, Mo Yan draws on his youthful experiences and on settings in the province of his birth. This is apparent in his novel Hong gaoliang jiazu (1987, in English Red Sorghum 1993)."

The winner will win a medal, a personal diploma and a cash award of 8 million Swedish Kronor (about 1 million U.S. dollars).

 Mo Yan has many short stories and essays on various topics to his credits. Many of Yan’s works have been translated into English, French and other languages.

Red Sorghum consists of five stories that unfold and interweave in Gaomi in several turbulent decades in the 20th century, with depictions of bandit culture, the Japanese occupation and the harsh conditions endured by poor farm workers, according to the biography. Red Sorghum was successfully filmed in 1987, directed by famous Chinese director Zhang Yimou.

Part of Yan’s bio says as a 12-year-old, during the Cultural Revolution, he left school to work, first in agriculture, later in a factory. In 1976 he joined the People's Liberation Army and during this time began to study literature and write. His first short story was published in a literary journal in 1981.

The academy added: “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 Garcia Marquez, at the same time finding a departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition.”
  Since 1901, the Nobel Prize is awarded to those described as "done most for the benefit of humanity." 

When the founder died in 1896, he had amassed an immense fortune, and asked in his will for a foundation to be created to award prizes to people whose careers "had done most for the benefit of humanity", irrespective of nationality, in such disciplines as chemistry, physics, medicine, literature and peace. The first prizes were awarded in 1901.

The laureates share 10 million Swedish krona (around 1,1 million Euros) to continue with their work. 

Candidates are chosen by the Swedish Academies for each discipline (or Norwegian in the case of the Nobel Peace Prize), as well as by 700 personalities or institutions which have authority in their field. ThEe shortlisting begins in February, and thinned to  five names in June. A committee of five academy members deliberates before announcing the winners in October. 

Winners are not likely announced posthumously (with the notable exception of Dag Hammarskjöld, Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1961), or to more than three people at once, which is sometimes a problem in the scientific disciplines. It cannot be awarded to the same person more than once. On the other hand, a laureate can win it in two different disciplines. Finally, it can be co-awarded to a person and an institution.

The Nobel Prize is not without controversy. Some past winners have been prevented by political forces going to the ceremony. Such examples are Sakharov, Pasternak, three German scientists under Hitler's regime. Also, in 2010, Chinese government did not recognise Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the dissident Liu Xiaobo. 

   

List of Past Nobel Winners in Literature:

1901	Rene F. A. Sully Prudhomme	France
1902	Theodore Mommsen	Germany
1903	Bjornsterne Bjornson	Norway
1904	Frederic Mistral Jose Echegaray	France Spain
1905	Henryk Sienkiewicz	Poland
1906	Giosue Carducci	Italy
1907	Rudyard Kipling	Great Britain
1908	Rudolf C. Eucken	Germany
1909	Selma Lagerlöf	Sweden
1910	Paul J. L. Heyse	Germany
1911	Maurice Maeterlinck	Belgium
1912	Gerhart Hauptmann	Germany
1913	Rabindranath Tagore	India
1914
1915	Romain Rolland	France
1916	Verner von Heidenstam	Sweden
1917	Karl A. Gjellerup Henrik Pontoppidan	Denmark Denmark
1918
1919	Carl F. G. Spitteler	Switzerland
1920	Knut Hamsun	Norway
1921	Anatole France	France
1922	Jacinto Benavente	Spain
1923	William Butler Yeats	Ireland
1924	Wladyslaw S. Reymont	Poland
1925	George Bernard Shaw	Ireland - Great Britain
1926	Grazia Deledda	Italy
1927	Henri Bergson	France
1928	Sigrid Undset	Norway
1929	Thomas Mann	Germany
1930	Sinclair Lewis	United States
1931	Erik A. Karlfeldt	Sweden
1932	John Galsworthy	Great Britain
1933	Ivan A. Bunin	Soviet Union
1934	Luigi Pirandello	Italy
1935
1936	Eugene O'Neill	United States
1937	Roger Martin du Gard	France
1938	Parl S. Buck	United States
1939	Frans E. Sillanpää	Finland
1940
1941
1942
1943
1944	Johannes V. Jensen	Denmark
1945	Gabriela Mistral	Chile
1946	Hermann Hesse	Germany - Switzerland
1947	André Gide	France
1948	T. S. Eliot	Great Britain
1949	William Faulkner	United States
1950	Bertrand Russell	Great Britain
1951	Pär F. Lagerkvist	Sweden
1952	Francois Mauriac	France
1953	Sir Winston Churchill	Great Britain
1954	Ernest Hemingway	United States
1955	Halldor K. Laxness	Iceland
1956	Juan Ramón Jiménez	Spain
1957	Albert Camus	France
1958	Boris L. Pasternak (declined)	Soviet Union
1959	Salvatore Quasimodo	Italy
1960	Saint-John Perse	France
1961	Ivo Andric	Yugoslavia
1962	John Steinbeck	United States
1963	Giorgos Seferis	Greece
1964	Jean Paul Sartre (declined)	France
1965	Mikhail Sholokhov	Soviet Union
1966	Samuel Joseph Agnon Nelly Sachs	Israel Sweden
1967	Miguel Angel Asturias	Guatemala
1968	Yasunari Kawabata	Japan
1969	Samuel Beckett	Ireland
1970	Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn	Soviet Union
1971	Pablo Neruda	Chile
1972	Heinrich Böll	Germany
1973	Patrick White	Australia
1974	Eyvind Johnson Harry Edmund Martinson	Sweden Sweden
1975	Eugenio Montale	Italy
1976	Saul Bellow	United States
1977	Vicente Aleixandre	Spain
1978	Isaac Bashevis Singer	United States
1979	Odysseus Elytis	Greek
1980	Czeslaw Milosz	Poland - United States
1981	Elias Canetti	Bulgaria - Great Britain
1982	Gabriel Garcia Marquez	Columbia - Mexico
1983	William Golding	Great Britain
1984	Jaroslav Siefert	Czechoslovakia
1985	Claude Simon	France
1986	Wole Soyinka	Nigeria
1987	Joseph Brodsky	Soviet Union - United States
1988	Naguib Mahfouz	Egypt
1989	Camilo José Cela	Spain
1990	Octavio Paz	Mexico
1991	Nadine Gordimer	South Africa
1992	Derek Walcott	West Indies
1993	Toni Morrison	United States
1994	Kenzaburo Oe	Japan
1995	Seamus Heaney	Ireland
1996	Wislawa Szymborska	Poland
1997	Dario Fo	Italy
1998	José Saramago	Portugal
1999	Günter Grass	Germany
2000	Gao Xingjian	France
2001	Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul	United Kingdom
2002	Imre Kertész	Hungary
2003	Imre Kertész	South Africa
2004	Elfriede Jelinek	Austria
2005	Harold Pinter	United Kingdom
2006	Orhan Pamuk	Turkey
2007	Doris Lessing	United Kingdom
2008	Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio	France
2009	Herta Müller	Germany
2010	Mario Vargas Llosa	Peru
2011	Tomas Tranströmer	Sweden

  2012        Mo Yan                                                        China