Mo Yan

Mo Yan, born Guan Moye on February 5, 1955, in Ping'an Village, Gaomi Township, Shandong Province, China, is a Chinese novelist and short story writer. Raised in a peasant family, he left school during the Cultural Revolution to work as a farmer before enlisting in the People's Liberation Army in 1976, where he began writing. He adopted his pen name 'Mo Yan' (meaning 'don't speak') in 1984 while attending the PLA Arts College. Mo Yan rose to prominence with his 1986 novel Red Sorghum, a hallucinatory realist epic later adapted into Zhang Yimou's Golden Bear-winning film. Other notable works include The Garlic Ballads (1988), Big Breasts and Wide Hips (1995), Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (2006), and Frog (2009). His style blends folk tales, history, and black humour, often satirising greed, corruption, and political upheaval in rural Shandong. In 2012, he became the first Chinese citizen to win the Nobel Prize in Literature for his 'hallucinatory realism.'