Chinese author Mo Yan wins Nobel Prize in literature

Chinese writer Mo Yan has won the Nobel Prize in literature for 2012, which makes him the first Chinese author ever to win the Nobel Prize in literature in the Nobel's 111-year history.

Gao Xingjian who won it in 2000, although born in China, is now a French citizen, having been living in Paris since 1989; and Pearl S Buck who took the prize in 1938 was an American author despite her long stay in China.

He is also perhaps the first ''non-right wing'' author to have won a Nobel Prize.

''The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2012 is awarded to the Chinese writer Mo Yan ''who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary,'' the Swedish Academy said while announcing his win at noon today.

Mo Yan (a pseudonym for Guan Moye) was born in a farming family in 1955 and grew up in Gaomi in Shandong province in north-eastern China.

He left school at 12 during the Mao Ze Dong's Cultural Revolution, to work, first in agriculture, later in a factory. And, in 1976, he joined the People's Liberation Army where he began to study literature and write. His first short story was published in a literary journal in 1981. His breakthrough came a few years later with the novella Touming de hong luobo (1986, published in French as Le radis de cristal 1993).