Novelist Mo Yan advises writers to be original
Nobel laureate tells HK audience to defy theory and embrace creativity instead
Writers who wish to exercise unrestrained creativity in their work must do their utmost to break away from commonly held theories about their craft, a Nobel laureate has advised.
"Theories bring about dogma, and dogma brings about a norm. With dogma and norm, a writer is bound and no longer free in his writing," 2012 Nobel Literature Prize winner Guan Moye, better known by his pen name Mo Yan, said.
"A writer should stay away from theories and, even better, break through them and write something totally different," he told an audience at the Open University yesterday.
"I have no worries about coming here," he said of the Occupy Central backdrop to his first public discourse in Hong Kong since he became the first Chinese national to win the top literary prize.
His speech, titled "Hallucinatory realism and contemporary Chinese literature", was part of a celebration for the 25th anniversary of the distance-learning institute, which granted him an honorary doctorate in 2005.
The Shandong native recalled how he and his fellow writers had been captivated by the magic realism genre pioneered by Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who won the Nobel Literature Prize in 1982. But he took his own path.