Chinese novelist Mo Yan, “one of the most famous, oft-banned and widely pirated of all Chinese writers,” has won the 2012 Nobel Prize in literature. He is known for authoring the book that is the basis for the film Red Sorghum by Zhang Yimou. The Nobel committee said Mo is a writer “who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary.” He was a nominee for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2007 for Big Breasts & Wide Hips. Bookmakers had Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami as the favorite to win.
