But he spent half his spoils on “a 200 sq metre (2,152 sq foot) property outside Beijing’s fifth ring road.“

In a piece called “Mo Money–Nobel prize winner’s novel attacks China’s food safety,” Week in China argues that because of the “10,000 dead pigs [that] turned up in the Huangpu River,” Mo Yan’s “most recently translated book – titled POW! – … seems almost eerily timely, even though the original Chinese version came out more than 10 years ago.”

Salman Rushdie on Chinese Censorship: “the reason that so many are upset with Mo Yan isn’t that he didn’t oppose censorship, but that he went out of his way to defend it.”

And in a piece I must have missed when it came out months ago, “Mo Yan: Frenemy of the State,” Nick Frisch argues that “In the Chinese tradition, literature does not exist as a sphere outside the state: literature is the state. Or rather, the state is literature itself.”

And in an interview, Mo Yan’s translator Howard Goldblatt says, “I take pride in the fact that the head of the Nobel Literature Committee told me in Stockholm how critical my English translations were in selecting Mo Yan as the 2012 laureate; I assume he said something similar to the French or Italian or Swedish translators, since the committee members read several languages, but, with one exception, not Chinese.” But: “On behalf of literary translators everywhere, let me declare that we have nothing to apologize for”

And pictures of the town Mo Yan grew up in.