A good week for … (October 14, 2012)

Mo Yan

The novelist became the first Chinese national to win the Nobel Prize for literature. The Swedish Academy, which picks the winners of the award, praised Mo Yan's "hallucinatory realism", saying it "merges folk tales, history and the contemporary". The 57-year-old will collect the 8 million kronor (HK$9.26 million) prize at a ceremony in Stockholm in December. Mo Yan (real name Guan Moye) is perhaps best-known for his 1987 novella Red Sorghum.

Jasper Tsang Yok-sing

Tsang was re-elected president of the Legislative Council, beating the Civic Party leader Alan Leong Kah-kit by 43 votes to 27 at the first meeting of the new Legco. Perhaps not surprisingly, Tsang's first day in the job was marked by a row with radical legislator Wong Yuk-man over whether the People Power lawmaker had delivered his oath of office properly.

Julia Gillard

The Australian prime minister seems to have been on the ropes since controversially ousting Labor Party colleague Kevin Rudd in 2010. But she won international praise for her stinging attack on opposition leader Tony Abbott, accusing him of a litany of sexist behaviour. She won plaudits from US feminist website Jezebel, which called her "badass", and from The New Yorker, among others.