ISTANBUL
The winner of the 2012 Nobel prize for literature, Chinese author Mo Yan's works will be translated to Turkish.
The books will be published by Can publishing house of Turkey as of 2013.
The editor in chief of the Can publishing house Zeynep Cagliyor said that they were happy to bring in an author's works to Turkish, who broke down the "only European writers could get the Nobel" prejudice. She added that they were honored to be preferred by Mr. Mo.
Mo Yan, who left school for a life working the fields at the age of 12, has become the first Chinese citizen ever to win the Nobel prize in literature, praised by the Swedish Academy for merging "folk tales, history and the contemporary" with "hallucinatory realism".
In its citation, the Swedish Academy noted that many of Mr. Mo’s works “have been judged subversive because of their sharp criticism of contemporary Chinese society.”“Through a mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspectives,” the Swedish Academy said in the citation that accompanied the award, “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.”
Mo Yan
The internationally renowned author Mo Yan (57) was born in China. The author’s given name is Guan Moye; Mo Yan, which means "don’t speak" is actually a pen name that reflects the time in which he grew up.
Mr. Mo’s books have touched on many of contemporary China’s most sensitive themes, including the Cultural Revolution and the country’s strict family-planning policies. Much of his work is laced with social criticism, and he is admired by readers of Chinese literature abroad as much as he is hugely popular in his own country.
In his novels and short stories, Mr. Mo paints sprawling, intricate portraits of Chinese rural life, often using flights of fancy — animal narrators, elements of fairy tales — that evoke the lyrical techniques of South American magical realists. His work has been widely translated and is readily available in the West, but he is perhaps best known abroad for “Red Sorghum,” an epic that takes on issues like the Japanese occupation, bandit culture and the harsh conditions in rural China, and which in 1987 was made into a movie directed by Zhang Yimou. In 2011, Mo Yan won the Mao Dun award, China's most prestigious literary award, for his novel Frog, which explores China's one-child policy.
Reporting by Sibel Erturk Kurtoglu
