Nobel laureate Mo Yan wins top domestic drama award

WUHAN -- Chinese Nobel laureate Mo Yan has won a "Golden Lion" Award, for his play "Our Jing Ke", organizers said on Sunday.

Mo and 13 others won the top prize in the dramatists category.

His play "Our Jing Ke" was published with two other plays shortly after he was announced winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature last month.

Xia Xiaohua, president of the Changjiang People's Art Theater in Wuhan, capital of central Hubei Province, said the theater has invited Mo to attend the awards ceremony scheduled for Dec.1.

The "Golden Lion" Award for dramas is held every three years in China with ten different categories.

"Our Jing Ke" re-tells a story about Jing Ke, an assassin famous for his failed attempt to kill a king, who later moved on to become China's first emperor more than 2,000 years ago.

But the Chinese household story is told from a new perspective in the book, where Jing's assassination attempt is reinterpreted into a result of his desire for instant fame, rather than a result of chivalry and altruism.

The Swedish Academy announced in Stockholm on October 11 that Mo would receive the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first Chinese national to win the award. He, with hallucinatory realism, merges folk tales, history and the contemporary.

Mo Yan, a pseudonym for Guan Moye, was born in 1955 and grew up in Gaomi in east China's Shandong Province.