MO YAN, the only Chinese author to win a Nobel Prize in Literature, remains in the center of the spotlight two years after he was crowned as a laureate in 2012.

    Winning the Nobel Prize naturally turned him into the best spokesperson for Chinese culture. He has been living a busy life, touring around different places in China and overseas giving numerous speeches and dialogues and offering counsel at various events.

    He recently attended a cultural festival and seminars on his works in his hometown in Gaomi, Shandong Province.

    Ever since he made his “The Storyteller” acceptance speech in December 2012, he seems to be an indispensable guest from various events.

    In September 2013, he was invited to visit Taiwan, where he gave a speech on how he turned himself from a farmer’s son into a Nobel Prize winning author. The visit was his first public speech in Taiwan. That same month, he shared his experience of winning the prize, and he said that he “felt more pressure in writing because any mistakes in his future writings would be amplified.”

    In December that year during a visit to Zhejiang University, he made a speech on how to tell stories and admitted that after winning the Nobel Prize, he had to attend so many conferences and make speeches that he “hardly read any books in 2013.”

    On June 6 of this year, he made a speech about his fiction and his hometown and said: “Hometown is an inescapable existence to a writer, and I pay tribute to my hometown in literature works.” He also said that he had delayed publication of his new book because he has experienced unprecedented pressure ever since he received the Nobel Prize.

    In August of this year, he was invited to attend the Chang’an and Silk Road Dialogue in Xi’an, Shaanxi Province, and to be a counselor for the Silk Road International Film Festival, which is to be held Oct. 20 to 25. He was also confirmed as the head scriptwriter for a movie to be filmed in Shaanxi.

    Last month, Mo attended an international seminar in France on researching his works and was conferred an honorary doctorate from Aix-Marseille University.

    The public’s attention on Mo seems to be overinflated, partly because after decades of waiting for a Chinese writer to win a Nobel Prize, China finally got one. As Mo has put it, he hopes a second Nobel Prize winner will show up to redirect some of the fervor away from him.(Anna Zhao)