News

This year's winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the European Union Prize for Literature and the German Book Prize have been announced in Frankfurt and Stockholm.

The 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to Chinese author Mo Yan, the first Chinese resident to win the prize. The Swedish Academy praised Mo Yan, describing how his "hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary". Mo began writing when he was a soldier in the People's Liberation Army, with his first work published in 1981. However he first garnered international recognition in 1987 for his novel Red Sorghum which was subsequently made into a film, winning the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. He has published numerous short stories and novels, many of which have been translated into English and other languages.

The 12 winners of the 2012 European Union Prize for Literature (EUPL), announced at the Frankfurt Book Fair last week, were Anna Kim (Austria), Lada Žigo (Croatia), Laurence Plazenet (France), Viktor Horváth (Hungary), Kevin Barry (Ireland), Emanuele Trevi (Italy), Giedra Radvilaviciute (Lithuania), Gunstein Bakke (Norway), Piotr Pazinski (Poland), Afonso Cruz (Portugal), Jana Benová (Slovakia) and Sara Mannheimer (Sweden). Each winner receives a prize of 5000 Euros, but more importantly, priority funding from the EU Culture Programme is made available to help with translations of their books into other languages. For more information about the prize, go to www.euprizeliterature.eu/

In Frankfurt, the 2012 German Book Prize was awarded to Ursula Krechel for her novel Landgericht (published by Jung und Jung). She beat five other German finalists to scoop the €25,000 prize which coincides with the opening of the Frankfurt Book Fair. The Prize is awarded by the German Publishers and Booksellers Association to the best German language novel of the year. For more information, go to http://www.deutscher-buchpreis.de/de/135173

Congratulations to all the winners from everyone at Banipal!