Since naming its very first recipient 62 years ago, the Golden Pen of Freedom has been turning the spotlight on repressive governments, and the journalists and news publishers who fight them, the world over.
On October 11 Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy in Stockholm, announced that the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2012 will go to the fifty-seven-year-old Chinese writer Guan Moye, better known as Mo Yan, a pen name that means “don’t talk.” (The name is said to have originated in advice his parents gave him as a school-age boy during the Mao era.)The news