Israeli writer wins top honor from Chinese college students

Israeli author Amos Oz shares with Chinese readers his views on writing and global issues. He was in Beijing last week to receive an award from Chinese university students. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Oz answered audience's questions about the relationship between his political and literary works at the award ceremony.

"Politics is very often full of exclamation marks. Literature is full of question marks," he says.

"Each time when I find myself agreeing with myself 100 percent, I'd write the political essay. I went to television. And I tell my government what I think they should do.

"Each time I find I don't completely agree with myself, and I hear inside myself two or three different voices about the same issue, then it's not time for political articles. It's the time when I discover that I am bearing a new story or a new novel."

Asked about Syria, he expresses concerns that people have forgotten the lessons of World War II, oppression and occupation.

"I have the impression that there is a rise of fanaticism in many parts of the world," Oz says.

His solution is humor.

"If I could put a sense of humor into capsules and make the whole world swallow my capsules of humor, thus creating an immunity to fanaticism and fundamentalism, I could deserve a Nobel Prize not in literature but in medicine," he says, jokingly.

Zhong Zhiqing, the translator of many of Oz's works, says many Chinese writers are his loyal readers, including Chinese Nobel Laureate for Literature, Mo Yan.

Zhong's translation of Oz's Scenes from Village Life was released on Friday.

Zhong accompanied Oz when he first visited China in 2007, when Oz met Mo.

She posted a transcript of their discussion on her blog. Topics meander from each other's works to their common experiences of serving the military, to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

"I admire you, Amos Oz, for not writing (A Tale of Love and Darkness) from a Jewish nationalist point of view but as a conscious artist standing at the level of the whole body of mankind, depicting the relationship between the Jews and the Arabs from an inclusive point of view," Mo says.

"I think politicians all over the world should read the book."