Author of the week: Mo Yan

last updated 8 January 2015

The winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for literature is not a tool of the Chinese Communist Party, said Andrew Jacobs and Sarah Lyall in The New York Times. Mo Yan seems to require such a defense: When he was named this year’s laureate last week, the 57-year-old novelist became perhaps the first writer so honored while enjoying the embrace of a communist government. Unlike two years ago, when China protested the awarding of a Nobel to jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo, Mo’s triumph has been celebrated by China’s state-run media. But “Mo Yan” is a pen name that confronts repression: It means “don’t speak,” a caution the future writer heard often in his youth. “My father and mother told me not to speak outside,” he told an audience in 2011. “If you say what you think, you will get into trouble.”

Mo’s use of magical realism may have helped him avoid censorship, said John Freeman in Granta.com. His novels about rural China, many of which have been translated into English, have been compared to the works of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, but Mo hadn’t read those authors when he began writing in his mid-20s. “If I had read their works sooner I would have already accomplished a masterpiece,” he says. He sometimes resorts to fanciful invention when directly addressing a tough issue might not be allowed. “At such a juncture a writer can inject their own imagination,” he says. “So, actually I believe these limitations or censorship is great for literature creation.”