The best is yet to come, says Mao Dun winner Mo Yan

"The great novel that matches the great times has yet to be written," writer Mo Yan says at the awards ceremony of the Eighth Mao Dun Literature Prize, held on Sept 19 at the National Center for the Performing Arts in Beijing.

It is out here, beckoning us, but the path to it remains unclear, he adds.

Mo, together with Zhang Wei, Liu Xinglong, Bi Feiyu and Liu Zhenyun, won this year's Mao Dun Literature Prize, the country's most prestigious literary prize for novels, awarded every four years. For the first time, since the establishment of the prize in 1982, each winner was given 500,000 yuan ($78,200).