Mo Yan

Mo Yan, born Guan Moye, is a Chinese writer born in 1955 in Shandong Province, in eastern China. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012, becoming the first Chinese citizen to win it. His work, written in Chinese, matters because it blends folk tales and rural oral tradition with narrative techniques drawn from Western literature, and because it portrays China's recent history through the eyes of ordinary people.

He grew up in Ping'an village, in Gaomi township, in a peasant family. He left school in fifth grade, at eleven, when the Cultural Revolution disrupted education, and spent much of his adolescence looking after animals on the grasslands. He taught himself to read with a dictionary of Chinese characters, the only book he had at hand. In 1973 he started work at a cotton processing factory and, after several years of trying, enlisted in the People's Liberation Army at the end of 1976. There he worked as a librarian and read voraciously, and during those years he began to write.

Translations of foreign literature circulating in the 1980s opened new horizons for him. Faulkner and García Márquez showed him that he could write about his own surroundings; by his own account, after reading The Sound and the Fury he realised he could turn his family and villagers into characters. In 1984 he published the novella A Transparent Radish and that same year entered the People's Liberation Army Academy of Art. In 1986 Red Sorghum appeared, making him known across the country. Director Zhang Yimou adapted its first parts into a film that won the Golden Bear at Berlin in 1988.

His style mixes hallucinatory realism with black humour, graphic violence and satire of socialist realism. A recurring theme is the persistence of human greed and corruption, whatever the ideology in force. Many of his novels are set near Gaomi and draw on the classic novel Water Margin and on oral folklore. He often shifts perspective: Red Sorghum recounts part of the Second Sino-Japanese War from the viewpoint of invading Japanese soldiers. The Republic of Wine, written during his postgraduate studies, uses cannibalism as a metaphor for China's self-destruction. His female characters often defy traditional gender roles, as in Big Breasts & Wide Hips.

His career has not been free of controversy. The Garlic Ballads, inspired by a real peasant revolt, was banned in mainland China after the Tiananmen crackdown of 1989 and could for a time be published only in Hong Kong and Taiwan. After the Nobel, some critics accused him of being too close to the government, citing his participation in a hand-copying event for the Yan'an Talks and his refusal to sign a petition calling for the release of Liu Xiaobo. In 2016 he became deputy chair of the Chinese Writers Association. His legacy lies chiefly in bringing contemporary Chinese fiction to readers abroad, largely thanks to the translations of Howard Goldblatt, who became his principal translator.