Chinese author Mo Yan—whose pen name translates to Do Not Speak—has won the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature. A short-story writer and essayist who, says the Nobel citation, “with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary,” Mo Yan said he was overjoyed and scared by the honor.

Continued the 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 García Márquez, at the same time finding a departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition.”

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