Campus Digest

Nobel laureate Mo Yan speaks on “Literature and Homeland Soils” at HKBU distinguished lecture

06 Oct 2016

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Professor Mo Yan shares on the topic of literature and homeland soils
Professor Mo Yan (centre) has a fruitful dialogue with Professor Shelley Chan of Wittenberg University, USA (left) and Dr Howard Choy of HKBU’s Department of Chinese Language and Literature.

 

Nobel laureate in literature Professor Mo Yan delivered a lecture yesterday as part of HKBU’s 60th Anniversary Shun Hing Distinguished Lecture Series. He shared with more than 500 attendees on the subject of “Literature and Homeland Soils”.

In his address, Professor Mo Yan said every nation and every era needs its own writers to reflect the life and culture of that particular period of time, and there is a need to creatively frame a new outlook for contemporary Chinese literature. He said that while homeland-soil literature is in a process of self-reformation and changing with the times, “people” should always be a core subject in literature. He said Chinese writers should look to local tradition and history for resources and materials for writing, and write about their hometown and childhood. He stressed that the root of literature is people, and he suggested young writers to care and write more about people as well as tap into their own life experience when observing people so as to broaden their scope in writing.

The talk was one of the distinguished lectures in the series supported by Shun Hing Education and Charity Fund to celebrate the University’s 60th Anniversary.