Nobel Prize laureate struggles to keep politics from work

Stockholm • This year’s Nobel Literature Prize laureate says his greatest challenge as a writer has been to reflect the social realities of his native China without allowing politics to suppress his work.

In his Nobel lecture in Stockholm on Friday, Mo Yan steered clear of politics but described the constraints he has experienced when being consumed by politics.

Mo, the first Chinese national to win the literature award, said heated emotions “allow politics to suppress literature.”

The 57-year-old writer, who has been criticized for membership in the Communist Party and for being vice-president of the partybacked writers’ association, gave The Garlic Ballads as an example. The novel, depicting peasant corruption, was banned in China.