Chinese leader congratulates Mo on Nobel win

BEIJING - Chinese leader Li Changchun wrote to the China Writers Association on Thursday to congratulate Mo Yan, vice-president of the body, on his winning of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature.

In his congratulatory letter, Li said Mo's victory reflects the prosperity and progress of Chinese literature, as well as the increasing national strength and influence of China, according to an official statement issued on Friday.

As China moves rapidly with its reform, opening-up and modernization drive, great creative vitality has emerged in Chinese literary circles, Li said.

"Basing their writing on the life of the people and the traditions of the nation, Chinese writers have created a great many excellent works of Chinese characteristics, styles and spirits," reads the letter.

Li, a Standing Committee member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, expressed hope that Chinese writers will focus on the country's people in their writing and create more excellent works that will stand the test of history.

"Thus, Chinese writers can contribute more to the prosperity and development of Chinese culture, as well as the progress of human civilization," he continued in the letter.

The Swedish Academy announced in Stockholm on Thursday that Mo Yan would receive the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first Chinese national to win the award.

Mo Yan, a pseudonym for Guan Moye, was born in 1955 and grew up in Gaomi in East China's Shandong province.

In his writing, Mo draws on his youth and the province of his birth, which are most apparent in his novel Red Sorghum, which was made into a film by director Zhang Yimou.

Big Breasts and Wide Hips and Life and Death are Wearing Me Out are also among his most famous works. His works have been translated and published in English, French, Swedish, Spanish, German, Italian and Japanese.

In Mo's works, "hallucinatory realism merges with folk tales, history and the contemporary," according to the official Noble citation.

"Through a mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspectives, Mo Yan has created a world reminiscent in its complexity of those in the writings of William Faulkner and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, at the same time finding a departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition," said a biographical notes posted on Nobelprize.org.