Chinese Writer Wins Nobel Prize for Literature - Central Coast News KION/KCBA

STOCKHOLM, Sweden -- Chinese writer Mo Yon won the 2012 Nobel prize for literature Thursday for works which the awarding committee saud had qualities of "hallucinatory realism."

The prize is worth $1.2 million and was given by the Swedish Academy.

"The Nobel Prize in literature for 2012 is awarded to the Chinese writer Mo Yan, who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary," said the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, Peter Englund.

The literature prize is the fourth of this year's crop of prizes, which were established in the will of Swedish dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel and awarded for the first time in 1901.