In October 2025, the prestigious Russian literary Yasnaya Polyana award was won by the Chinese writer and Nobel laureate Mo Yan for his novel Sandalwood Death. The plot is based on one of the most tragic pages in Chinese history, the Boxer Rebellion of 1899–1901. In the literature of the BRICS countries, references to history are a powerful tool for comprehending national identity and, more broadly, people’s inner world in general, their spiritual quests. The specific national context serves as a backdrop to profound reflection on universal themes. BRICS Business Magazine will tell about these masterpieces and their creators.
Nobel Prize laureate (2012) and Yasnaya Polyana Award laureate (2025)
In Mo Yan’s novel Sandalwood Death, Chinese folklore coexists with an anti-colonial aspect, while some critics have called the book a socio-historical horror story. The action unfolds during the period of protests against the expansion of foreign powers. German corporations are building a railway, disrupting the customary way of life in the region. A maoqiang opera performer, Sun Bin, initiates a rebellion against the Germans, for which he is sentenced to brutal public execution. The executioner appointed is Sun Bin’s father-in-law, while his daughter is passionately in love with the regional chief, who controls the execution. Personal relationships conflict with civic duty, adding tragedy to an already horrific situation. The author introduces into the plot real political figures of the Celestial Empire of that time and structures the novel according to the laws of maoqiang opera. The book contains many details highlighting the traditions, mentality, and way of life of the Chinese people at the beginning of the 20th century. In 2012 Mo Yan had already received a Nobel Prize for Literature for “his hallucinatory realism, which merges folk tales, history and contemporary” This characterization also applies to the novel Sandalwood Death.
Laureate of the Big Book Award (2023) and the Yasnaya Polyana Award (2013)
Evgeny Vodolazkin works with historicism and national culture in a unique way. His novel Laurus was published in 2015 and received major literary awards in his homeland. The novel’s action takes place in the 15th century, and the narrative is constructed in the style of several Old Russian genres at once: hagiography, pilgrimage tale, parable, and domestic novel. Telling the story of the life of the mediaeval physician Arseny, the author describes his spiritual journey to sainthood through love, faith, and redemption. The historical context of the novel is very detailed but it does not mention specific historical events or real personalities of the time. The main character embodies the global worldview of a person in Old Russia. The book is unique in that, despite the difficult philosophical subtext and the language stylized to resemble Old Russian speech, a huge number of readers in Russia and beyond find it both understandable and close to them. Laurus has been translated into 30 languages.
In 2008, he received a special award from the Guinness World Records publishers for the most translated novel, The Alchemist
Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho, who is very popular in Russia, lays claim to timeless and trans-geographical morality and truth. In his novel The Devil and Miss Prym, the author does not use the national folklore of any particular country but works with deeper cultural layers. As a preface, he recalls the story of Adam and Eve as an example of human choice. Plus he uses the Persian legend of God having two sons: Good and Evil. The plot could be set in any country and involve any people. The inhabitants of a small modern town face a difficult moral choice. A mysterious stranger is ready to give the town 11 gold bars in exchange for murdering of any one resident. All the townspeople succumb to the temptation, and the young Miss Prym suffers the most from the need to choose between wealth and conscience.
Nobel Prize laureate (1998)
Naguib Mahfouz wrote the book Children of the Alley as a parable combining images from Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The book was completed in 1959 and first published in 1967, rousing a wave of criticism and indignation in the author’s homeland. The novel is built on allegories and metaphors, through which each character can be recognized as a prophet from one of the religions. Like Adam and Eve, Adham and Umayma are expelled from their father’s house for being disobedient and deceitful. Their sons Kadri and Humam suffer the fate of Cain and Abel, with one brother killing the other. The compassionate Rifaa, son of a carpenter, is modelled on Jesus Christ. The children of the alley also include Qassem, reminiscent of the Prophet Muhammad. The writer created a model of the world on the scale of a single alley, where all families descend from one elder (the Creator) named Jabalawi. In the final chapter, he is defeated by a young man named Arafa. So, the writer figuratively describes the victory of progress over religion. The book was banned in many Arab countries, but, in 1988, Mahfouz received the Nobel Prize “for works rich in nuance, now clear-sightedly realistic, now evocatively ambiguous, that have formed an Arabian narrative art applicable to all mankind”.
Booker Prize laureate (1997)
She received the award for her debut novel The God of Small Things, which touches on themes such as the caste system, Communist ideals, and the status of women. Brother and sister twins, separated more than 20 years ago, are reunited in their childhood home, from which they were exiled along with their mother after certain tragic events. All these years, they carried within them a sense of guilt imposed by their grandmother. Plus a sense of emptiness because, for the first seven years of their lives, they were almost a united whole. Years later, they again walk the paths of their childhood in order to understand what they were truly guilty of. The author gives an unvarnished description of the life and relationships between representatives of different castes in the late 1960s. Even though caste discrimination has been banned in India since 1950, the national memory was not so easy to eradicate, even for party members.
Heinz Awards laureate (2014)
There is also a novel about twins by Abraham Verghese, another man of Indian origin, now an American professor of medicine. He was born and raised in Ethiopia, about which country he wrote his book Cutting for Stone in 2008. A family saga about brothers raised by strangers in a missionary hospital in Addis Ababa unfolds against the backdrop of Ethiopian history in the mid‑20th century, during the reign of Emperor Haile Selassie. When they are about 30 years old, the brothers meet their biological father, and the three of them become involved in a medical experiment that will give life to one of them but kill the other. The characters’ commitment to medicine precludes any magical elements in the plot, yet some twists of fate can only be called miraculous. The skill of the doctors performing the most complex operations under the difficult conditions of an African country is shocking and astounding. Military coups and betrayals among the highest echelons of power coexist in the book with betrayals and upheavals in the lives of the brothers and their loved ones.
Booker Prize laureate (2021)
The award was given to this writer and playwright for his novel The Promise. The plot spans half a century of South African history, this providing a backdrop for the story of the decline of the Swart family. A series of deaths, of the mother, father, sister, and brother of Amor, the main character are not directly caused by political cataclysms but are closely intertwined with them and symbolic. The plot is formed by a promise made by the family’s father to his dying wife: to give their black maid Salome the small house on the farm where she has lived for many years. Under apartheid, this promise seemed virtually impossible to fulfil. If it hadn’t been for the principled stance of young Amor, this promise might have been forgotten. For the main character, it became a matter of honour to fulfil her mother’s will although, in the end, this gesture was met not with gratitude but with reproaches from Salome’s son. The story of the Swarts unfolds against the backdrop of key events in South Africa: from racial unrest and Mandela’s rule to the football championship and a new wave of corruption. The author deliberately abandons the highlighting of direct speech, merging it with the characters’ internal monologues and dreams. This technique completely immerses the reader in their continuous stream of consciousness, their personal dramas and grand History.
Prince Claus Award laureate(2018)
In 2002, Eka Kurniawan wrote the novel Beauty Is a Wound in the genre of magical realism, where the mundane and the fantastic coexist without surprising anyone. For example, the book begins with the main character, Dewi Ayu, rising from her grave 21 years after her death, while one of her daughter’s babies, conceived without love, disappear from her womb. Among the folkloric motifs, the author includes a story that repeats an Indonesian fairy tale, and a legend of his own about Princess Rengganis. Yet there are also real facts from Indonesian history in the novel: the guerrilla movement of the mid‑20th century, the Japanese occupation, the war for independence. While maintaining the narrative on the cusp of reality and fiction, Eka Kurniawan avoids evaluative judgments regarding events and the characters’ actions. Even so, using mythical exaggeration and satire, the author draws attention to such themes as marriages of convenience, blood feuds, domestic violence, and mass killings. In 2015, the book was translated into 24 languages, and, in 2016, it was longlisted for the Booker Prize.
Laureate of the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (Prize for the Best Foreign Book) (2003)
Written in 2003 and published in Russian in 2022, the book Reading Lolita in Tehran by Iranian writer Azar Nafisi is a documentary auto-fiction, in which the role of a parallel magical reality is played by Western literature. Professor Nafisi returned to Iran from the USA on the eve of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, witnessed and participated in political events that transformed the country she had left as an adolescent. After being dismissed from the University of Tehran for refusing to cover her head, the lady professor gathers a women’s literary circle where her students can hide from reality, at least for a while. Although the novel’s heroines, who attend the literary circle, read not only Nabokov, it is precisely Lolita’s fate that, to Nafisi, seems similar to that of Iranian women: in both cases, there was a “one person’s life is confiscated by another”. Arriving the reading club, the young women take off their black robes, revealing bright-coloured blouses, big earrings, and red manicures. Professor Nafisi teaches her students the power of imagination, aware that many of them have already been in prison and suffered friends being executed.
Laureate of the Emirates Appreciation Award for Science, Arts and Literature (2006)
In the United Arab Emirates, modern fiction in the Western sense replaced the national canon only in the 1970s. One of the most prolific Emirati short story writers is Mohammad Al Murr. Educated in the USA in the 1970s‑1980s, he wrote a hundred and fifty Dubai Tales, witty, sad stories about the lives of his contemporaries. The author avoids the linguistic flamboyance inherent in Arabic prose, writing quite simply and clearly. He tells of young people suffering from the tradition of marriages arranged by older relatives. Or he writes in the spirit of O. Henry about a hero falling in love with the smile of a random passer-by, who turns out to be a simpleton. He knows well the life of Arab emigrants to the USA and, conversely, understands what surprises foreigners who settle in the UAE. So, incidents from the lives of such characters seem quite realistic, and the toponymy in his stories corresponds to reality.
