The choice of the Chinese writer Mo Yan as the winner of this year's Nobel prize for literature is "a slap in the face for all those working for democracy and human rights", according to the author Herta Müller, who won the Nobel in 2009.
Speaking to the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter this weekend, Müller – whose own, often-censored novels draw from the time she spent living under Ceausescu's Securitate and then in exile in Berlin – said she wanted to cry when she learned of Mo's win in October. She called the decision a "catastrophe" and "extremely upsetting", according to the Australian Associated Press and the Complete Review.
Mo was hailed by the Nobel committee for merging "folk tales, history and the contemporary" with "hallucinatory realism". His win was celebrated by Chinese state media, although some have criticised him for being too close to the establishment. The artist Ai Weiwei said in October that "he has been very clearly pursuing the party's line and in several cases he has shown no respect for the independence of intellectuals".
Müller, whose citation from the Nobel committee heralded her for depicting the "landscape of the dispossessed" with "the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose", said that Mo "celebrates censorship".
"The Chinese themselves say that Mo Yan is an official of the same rung as a (government) minister," she told Dagens Nyheter, criticising the Chinese author for copying by hand Mao Zedong's speech on how art should serve communism, and for failing to speak out about the imprisonment of the jailed 2010 Nobel peace laureate Liu Xiaobo.
The day after winning the Nobel, Mo told reporters: "I hope [Liu] can achieve his freedom as soon as possible." But Müller said: "He should have said that four years ago, or at least two weeks before receiving the prize."
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