Chinese writer Mo Yan won the 2012 Nobel prize for literature on Thursday for works which the awarding committee said had qualities of "hallucinatory realism".

The prize won by the writer is worth 8 million crowns ($1.2 million) and was given by the Swedish Academy.

The literature prize is the fourth of this year's crop of prizes, which were established in the will of Swedish dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel and awarded for the first time in 1901.

To be updated...