The author who is perhaps best known for his tale of “Red Sorghum”  that has been cinematically recaptured by director Zhang Yimou, Mo Yan became the first Chinese national to win a Nobel literature prize.  The committee described him as one “who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary.” Congrats to him, although I’m generally not a big fan of the non-science Nobel prizes.

“His win makes him the first Chinese writer to win the Nobel in its 111-year history: although Gao Xingjian won in 2000, and was born in China, he is now a French citizen, and although Pearl Buck took the prize in 1938, for “her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces”, she is an American author.”