Why writer Mo Yan thinks his Nobel Prize was a blessing and a curse
The Chinese novelist’s profile was massively raised by winning the literature prize, but he has struggled to write since, he says
Chinese Nobel Prize for literature winner Guan Moye, better known by his pen name Mo Yan, is desperate to get back to writing.
It has been almost five years since the Shandong province-born novelist became the first mainland Chinese to win the literature prize in October 2012. Chinese-born Gao Xingjian won it in 2000, but had been granted French citizenship two years earlier.
The past few years have been fruitful for boosting Mo’s public profile. For writing, less fertile, he says.
“I’ve barely written anything,” he said during a speech in Hong Kong on Wednesday, prompting laughter from the audience.
Mo Yan said that winning the Nobel Prize had made him too meticulous to publish anything.
This compared with the reverie of his most productive writing period between 1984 and 1986 when he wrote almost 800,000 words of fiction, including Red Sorghum, the novel that made his name and was later adapted into a film by the Chinese director Zhang Yimou.