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Israeli author Amos Oz has long been a favored Nobel Prize contender and has received dozens of literary prizes around the world - including the 21 University Students International Literary Award, which he received in Beijing last week.
A jury of 21 students from Renmin University's liberal arts school, ranging from undergraduates to doctoral students, selected the 77-year-old to receive the honor.
"I have received in my life maybe 40 or 50 literary prizes. All of them are from juries of professors and scholars. This is the first time I've received a prize from students," Oz tells China Daily after the ceremony.
"This is very special for me."
He jokes: "And I can assure you, if they never give me the Nobel Prize, I am not going to die an unhappy man."
Creative writing student and juror Zhang Chu quotes the citation: "With poetic language full of allusions and imagination, Mr Amos Oz pursues the hidden pains of the individual, family and the nation through his writing, depicting the intertwined fate of the state and the individual, and thereby expressing concerns for the reality of all human beings."
Oz was born in Jerusalem in 1939, nine years before Israel became a state.
His mother committed suicide when he was 12.
Two years later, he moved to a kibbutz - a community of collective farmers - where he started writing.
Oz's most famous work is his autobiographical novel, A Tale of Love and Darkness, published in 2002.
He examines the trials of his youth, and interweaves his family's tragedies and kibbutz life with Israel's establishment.
The book has been translated into more than 20 languages. Its Chinese edition was published in 2007.
In 2015, it was adapted into a film directed by and starring Israeli-American actress Natalie Portman. Its Asian premiere sold out in less than a minute during April's Beijing International Film Festival.
The students asked Oz how he felt about the film. He called Portman's efforts "wholehearted".
"I am very impressed by how much of herself she put into the film," says Oz.
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."
xingyi@chinadaily.com.cn
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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. Provided To China Daily
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