Nobel Prize Awarded to Mo Yan

The 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded on 11 October to the Chinese author Mo Yan. The novelist, essayist, and short story writer was cited by the Nobel Foundation for his “hallucinatory realism,” which “merges folk tales, history and the contemporary.” At the 2008 MLA Annual Convention in San Francisco, Mo spoke at a forum entitled “Mo Yan and the Reemergence of Literary Independence in Post-Mao China”; he was named an MLA honorary fellow in May 2010.