Why novelist Yan Lianke chooses anxiety over sleep

For Yan Lianke — the Chinese novelist whose searing satires of modern China have been both banned at home and celebrated abroad — being a writer is to live under a constant weight of unease. “It is anxiety that makes you swallow sleeping pills night after night. It’s a torment,” he said at a press conference in Seoul Thursday, on the eve of his scheduled appearance at this year’s Seoul International Writers’ Festival (SIWF). “I wouldn’t recommend surrendering peaceful nights to sleepless anxiety just for literature.” Yet the Franz Kafka Prize-winning author has chosen that path for himself. What power does literature hold that makes it worth giving up his tranquil slumber? “The experience of a writer, of any one person, is always limited. And yet from these limits we try to reach toward the limitless,” he said. “The truth of literature lies not only in what can be seen and touched, but also in what remains unseen: a truth that withholds itself, a truth that in its very unreality still feels real and a truth veiled in mystery.” For Yan, writing means transforminWeiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei Korea Times Weiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei Korea Times