Stockholm, Oct 11 (IBNS): The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2012 was awarded on Thursday to Chinese writer Mo Yan.
The Swedish Academy which confers the Nobel Prize said Yan is a writer 'who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary'.
57-year-old Guan Moye, who is better known by the pen name Mo Yan, was born in the northeast Gaomi township in Shandong province of China to a family of farmers.
He left school during the Cultural Revolution to work in a factory that produced oil. He joined the People's Liberation Army at age twenty, and began writing while he was still a soldier, in 1981.
Three years later, he was given a teaching position at the Department of Literature in the Army's Cultural Academy.
Mo Yan has published dozens of short stories and novels in Chinese. His first novel was 'Falling Rain on a Spring Night', published in 1981.
He is known in the West for two of his novels which were the basis of the film 'Red Sorghum'.
Yan's noted works include 'Big Breasts & Wide Hips' and 'The Republic of Wine: A Novel'.
