This year’s Nobel prize winner for literature  says his greatest challenge as a writer has been to reflect the social realities of his native China without allowing politics to suppress his work.

In his Nobel lecture in Stockholm today  Mo Yan mostly steered clear of politics but he did describe the constraints he has experienced when being consumed by politics.

He says  heated emotions “allow politics to suppress literature.”

The 57-year-old writer has been criticized for membership in the Communist Party and for being vice-president of the party-backed writers’ association.

Mo’s  “The Garlic Ballads” depicts  a peasant uprising and corruption.

The book was banned in China.