European Union wins Nobel Peace Prize 2012, Literature for Chinese

(October 12, 2012) The European Union has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize 2012 for its efforts to promote peace and democracy in Europe, in the midst of the union's biggest crisis since its creation in the 1950s. The Norwegian prize committee said the EU received the award for six decades of contributions ``to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe. ``The stabilizing part played by the European Union has helped to transform a once torn Europe from a continent of war to a continent of peace,'' Nobel committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland said. The EU rose from the ashes of World War II, born of the conviction that ever closer economic ties would make sure that century-old enemies never turned on each other again. The idea began to take on a more defined shape when, on May 9, 1950, French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman proposed that France and the Federal Republic of Germany pool their coal and steel resources in a new organization that other European countries could join.
Earlier on Thursday, Chinese writer Mo Yan won this year’s Nobel Prize in literature, for what the Swedish Academy praised as his “hallucinatoric realism,” that “merges folk tales, history and the contemporary.'' Peter Englund, the academy's permanent secretary, said the academy had contacted Mo before the announcement, and he said he was “overjoyed and scared.'' “He's written 11 novels and let's say a hundred short stories,'' Englund said. “If you want to start off to get a sense of how he is writing and also get a sense of the moral core in what he is writing I would recommend `The Garlic Ballads,'' he added. Though the 57-year old Mo is the first Chinese national to win the Nobel literature prize, he's not the first Chinese. A Chinese emigre to France, Gao Xingjian, won in 2000 for his absurdist dramas and inventive fiction, especially the novel Soul Mountain. His works are laced with criticisms of China's communist government and have been banned in China.