RENMIN UNIVERSITY, 1 June 2014 (Via RUC English News)-----Yan Lianke, a distinguished Chinese writer and professor from the School of Liberal Arts, Renmin University of China (RUC), has been awarded the Franz Kafka Prize recently, the first Chinese to win the award ever. This is another important international award Professor Yan Lianke has received after he was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize 2013 and won the twelfth Malaysia top Chinese literature award--the Flower Trace of world Chinese Literature Award. Yan is to accept this award in Prague in October. The previous year of 2013 has witnessed “Yan Lianke’s theme year for literary writing”. In 2013, Prof. Yan Lianke published his latest novel, the Chronicles of Zhalie (炸裂志 zha lie zhi), a masterpiece of unrealism, and became one of the bestsellers. From March to April, he delivered tour speeches on literary creation in 10 North American universities, such as Harvard, Yale, Duke and Berkeley, where various activities were held concerning the literary writing of Yan. In Taiwan, an international symposium was held,“International Conference on Art of Fiction of World Chinse Literature--the Case Study of Novels by Yan Lianke". This symposium was attended by more than 20 writers, scholars and translators from U.S.A, Sweden, Spain, France, Italy, Mainland China, Hongkong and Taiwan. They agreed unanimously that the exploration of Yan in recent years has brought to the literary world a meaningful revelation. The Franz Kafka Prize is an international literary award presented annually in memory of Franz Kafka, a great novelist in the twentieth century. It is the highest literary award in the Czech Republic and one of the most prestigious honors of modern world literature. The only requirement for nomination is that the candidate should publish at least one of his/her works in Czech. And the criterion for winning the prize lies in “the work’s humanistic character and contribution to cultural, national, language and religious tolerance, its existential, timeless character, its generally human validity and its ability to hand over a testimony about our times”. Yan Lianke was born in Song County, Henan Province in 1958. In February 2009, he joined the faculty of School of Liberal Arts of Remin University of China. He is a member of the Chinese Writers’ Association and the recipient of more than 20 literary awards, including the first and second Lu Xun Literary Prizes and the third the Lao She Award for literary excellence as well as many other awards both home and abroad. His works, published in 20 odd countries and regions, have been translated into many languages such as French, English, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Italian, Dutch, Norwegian, Czech, Hebrew, Spanish and Serbian. His representative works are as follows: The Dream of Ding Village (丁庄梦, Ding Zhuang Meng),The Joy of Living (Alt title: The Living, 受活,Shou Huo),The Sunlit Years (日光流年, Riguang Liunian), Solidity of Water (Alt title: Hard as Water, 坚硬如水, Jianying Ru Shui), and Serve the People (为人民服务, Wei Renmin Fuwu), Days, Months, Years (年月日,Nian Yue Ri), Song of the Plow (耙耧天歌, Palou Tiange). (Transwritten by Cai Yue’e, Xiao Yusui, Huang Yiwei. Reviewed by Long Yan)