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The recent announcement that Chinese writer Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize in Literature has sparked conversations, like the one with Jeffrey Brown on PBS NewsHour, about what it means to be a writer living under a Communist government.
Mo Yan, the Chinese author best known for his 1987 novel Red Sorghum, has received the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature.
After months of speculation, the announcement was made at a press conference in Stockholm early today by Peter Englund, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, who described Mo Yan’s work as “hallucinatory realism,” and lauded the author for his stylistically unique and culturally important contributions to the international literary community.
Mo Yan was born in 1955 to a farming family and raised in the rural Shandong Province of China, which serves as the setting for many of his novels and short stories. He grew up during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and began writing while serving in the People’s Liberation Army. His first short story was published in 1981. Including Red Sorghum, which was published in English in 2003 by Viking and adapted for film by Zhang Yimou, Mo Yan is the author of ten novels, among them The Garlic Ballads (1988, published in English in 1995), The Republic of Wine (1992, published in English in 2000), Big Breasts and Wide Hips (1996, published in English in 2004), Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (2006, published in English in 2008), and Sandalwood Death (2004, to be published in English in 2013), and more than eighty short stories. His most recent book, Wa, was published in Chinese in 2009.
Widely recognized for his pointed criticism of contemporary Chinese society, the author—whose given name is Guan Moye—adopted the pen name Mo Yan, which means “don’t speak,” to reflect the time in which he grew up, when citizens were unable to safely criticize those in power. “There is a very strong moral core in [his writing],” Englund said in an interview following the prize announcement. “It’s about ordinary people struggling—struggling to survive, struggling for their dignity—sometimes winning, but most of the time losing.”
One of China's most prolific and well-known writers, Mo Yan is celebrated not just for his engagement with Chinese history and politics, but also for his unique craft. “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 García Márquez, at the same time finding a departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition,” the Swedish Academy said in a statement.
Mo Yan is only the second Chinese writer to receive the Nobel Prize, following novelist Gao Xingjian in 2000. Other recent recipients have included Turkey's Orhan Pamuk, Britain's Doris Lessing, France's Jean-Marie Gustave le Clezio, Germany's Herta Muller, and Peru's Mario Vargas Llosa. Last year, the prize went to Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer.
Speaking to the China News Service, Mo Yan said he was overjoyed to have won. “But I do not think that my winning can be seen as representing anything,” he said. “I think that China has many outstanding authors, and their great works should also be recognized by the world.”
Administered annually since 1901 by the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm, Sweden, the Nobel Prize is awarded internationally for outstanding achievements in literature, physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, and peace. Candidates for the prize in literature are invited to submit by the Nobel Committee, and recipients are selected by the eighteen-member Swedish Academy. Mo Yan will receive the prize, which includes a cash award and medal, on December 10 in Stockholm.
As explained in this clip from AbeBooks, a first edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby sold for $182,000 at auction in 2009, and the reason it fetched such a high price was the presence of its dust jacket. A first edition of the novel without a dust jacket could sell for anywhere between two thousand and eight thousand dollars, depending on its condition.
Buy yourself five postcards. Write one question on each postcard and send them to yourself every other day. When you receive the postcard, write for twenty minutes, responding to the question. Use these responses as the ingredients for a story.
In this clip the actor, filmmaker, and author of No One Belongs Here More Than You (Scribner, 2007) and It Chooses You (McSweeney's, 2011), among other books, offers a helpful strategy for avoiding procrastination.
The National Book Foundation announced the finalists for the sixty-third annual National Book Awards today. Among the most prestigious literary honors in the United States, the awards are given for books published in the previous year.
The finalists in fiction are Junot Díaz for This Is How You Lose Her (Riverhead Books), Dave Eggers for A Hologram for the King (McSweeney’s Books), Louise Erdrich for The Round House (Harper), Ben Fountain for Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (Ecco), and Kevin Powers for The Yellow Birds (Little, Brown).
The finalists in poetry are David Ferry for Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations (University of Chicago Press), Cynthia Huntington for Heavenly Bodies (Southern Illinois University Press), Tim Seibles for Fast Animal (Etruscan Press), Alan Shapiro for Night of the Republic (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), and Susan Wheeler for Meme (University of Iowa Press).
The finalists in nonfiction are Anne Applebaum for Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-1956 (Doubleday), Katherine Boo for Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (Random House), Robert A. Caro for The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 4 (Knopf), Domingo Martinez for The Boy Kings of Texas (Lyons Press), and the late Anthony Shadid for House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).
The finalists were announced this morning by the chairman of the National Book Awards, David Steinberger, on the MSNBC program “Morning Joe.” The year’s selections include writers both emerging and established, with two of the finalists representing debut works. “We are particularly pleased that the finalists include some of the most well-known literary names in America and new names and faces to the National Book Awards,” Harold Augenbraum, the executive director of the National Book Foundation, said in a statement.
The winners—one each in fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and young people’s literature—will be announced at the National Book Awards benefit dinner and ceremony in New York City on November 14. They will each receive $10,000, and all finalists will receive $1,000. Elmore Leonard, whose most recent novel is Raylan (William Morrow, 2012), will be awarded the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. New York Times chairman and publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr. will receive the Foundation’s Literarian Award for Outstanding Contribution to the American Literary Community.
Publishers submitted 1,285 books for the 2012 awards, including 311 in fiction, 479 in nonfiction, and 181 in poetry. The finalists are selected by four panels of judges, comprised of distinguished individuals in the literary community. Established in 1950, the New York City-based National Book Foundation gave the first annual National Book Award to poet William Carlos Williams; William Faulkner received the award in fiction the following year. Recent winners have included fiction writer Jesmyn Ward, poet Nikky Finney, and nonfiction writer Stephen Greenblatt. The Foundation also recently released the recipients of the 2012 5 under 35 awards, which honor emerging writers under the age of thirty-five.
October writer-in-residence Sehba Sarwar blogs about P&W-supported Voices Breaking Boundaries (VBB), a Houston-based alternative arts organization. A writer and multidisciplinary artist, Sarwar uses her poetry, prose, and video/art installations to explore displacement and women’s issues on a domestic and global level. Her first novel, Black Wings, was published in 2004, and she is currently working on a second manuscript tentatively entitled "Island."
In Pakistan, September 21, 2012, was marked as a day of remembrance for Prophet Mohammad in response to a film that went viral and sparked violence in parts of North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. Knowing that the time difference between Houston and Pakistan was ten hours, I began checking online Pakistani newspapers as soon as I awoke. By the end of twenty-four hours, more than twenty people had been killed and six cinema houses had been burned. Meanwhile, progressive and secular communities that formed Pakistan’s majority were posting comments asking why extremists weren’t using their energies to offer help to the southern part of the country, where floods once again disrupted lives.
Two days after the protests, I received an e-blast from an Islamabad-based arts organization, Kuch Khaas, announcing screenings of selected best films from FilmSaar International Children’s Film Festival, and of course, in Karachi, T2F had resumed its regular programming. Life was returning to normal—something that must happen since flare-ups are part of daily living all around Pakistan.
More than ever, I appreciate that even though I’m based in Houston, I’ve woven my work so that I remain connected to alternative art and communities in Pakistan. The reality that I know is not reported in mainstream media. Sensationalist news always makes headlines, but I believe it’s also important to write about an independent arts organization screening children’s movies—despite the burning of cinema halls. Many organizations and independent artists in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, and Iraq continue to do the same, and their realities exist parallel to the deaths and protests that are reported to outside communities.
Through my work with Voices Breaking Boundaries, we create productions that juxtapose art and images from Pakistan and Houston so that our audience can find parallels between the two places. The purpose of these productions and workshops is to open space for innovative art from Karachi and Houston while also breaking down stereotypes about the issues we research. Further down the road, VBB is looking to expand research into other countries, including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Mexico, so that our audiences can experience art from unexpected communities about issues that are largely unknown. Using digital space and live performances to create alternative productions is even more critical in these times, when divisions in the world are more fractured. As Patti Smith said, in her 2010 visit to Houston: “We create art to illuminate.” As artists and writers, it’s important for us to dig deeper beyond the surface news—all around the world.
Photo: Sehba Sarwar. Credit: Emaan Reza.
Support for Readings/Workshops events in Houston is provided by an endowment established with generous contributions from the Poets & Writers Board of Directors and others. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.
October is National Bullying Awareness Month, and Open Road Media put together this video of authors Dean Koontz, Peter Lerangis, Bette Greene, Patty MacLachlan, and Logan Levkoff speaking out on the subject.
The author of The House on Mango Street read earlier this year at the Guadelupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio as part of the Librotraficante Caravan.
