Mo Yan

Mo Yan was born Guan Moye in 1955 into a peasant family in Gaomi, in Shandong province. Classed as politically suspect and with schooling disrupted by the Cultural Revolution, he left school at eleven and was put to work herding animals, teaching himself characters from a dictionary that was the only book he owned. After years in a cotton factory he enlisted in the People’s Liberation Army at the end of 1976, and began publishing while a soldier, adopting the pen name Mo Yan — “don’t speak” — in 1981. He later studied at the army’s arts academy and in a postgraduate programme run with Beijing Normal University.

Red Sorghum, serialised in 1986, made him famous, and Zhang Yimou’s film of it won the Golden Bear in Berlin. Most of his fiction returns to Northeast Gaomi Township, a version of his birthplace that serves as a stage for the upheavals of modern China. The Garlic Ballads grew out of a real farmers’ riot; The Republic of Wine is a grotesque satire in which cannibalism stands in for official appetite; in Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out a landlord executed during land reform is reborn as a succession of farm animals; Frog follows a village midwife through the one-child policy. The manner is earthy, digressive and darkly comic, mixing narrators and registers, and much of it has reached English through Howard Goldblatt’s translations.

The Swedish Academy gave him the Nobel Prize in 2012 for a hallucinatory realism that merges folk tales, history and the present day; he was the first Chinese citizen to receive it. The award was contested by writers and artists who considered him too close to the state, and he has held senior office in the official China Writers Association. His novels, meanwhile, continue to be read as among the most vivid and unruly portraits of rural China’s twentieth century.