Mo Yan

Mo Yan—the pen name of Guan Moye—is a Chinese novelist and short-story writer born in Shandong Province in 1955. His fiction draws heavily upon rural life, folklore and the turbulent political history of twentieth-century China, frequently combining social realism with grotesque comedy, fantasy and myth. In 2012 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature for a style the Nobel committee described as “hallucinatory realism” merging folk tales, history and contemporary experience. His work often examines hunger, violence, family survival, political upheaval and the relationship between peasants and the land. (Nobel Prize)

His clearest historical novels include Red Sorghum, a family saga set in Shandong during the 1920s and 1930s, including the Japanese invasion and occupation; Big Breasts and Wide Hips, which follows a family through much of twentieth-century Chinese history; and Sandalwood Death, set during the decline of the Qing dynasty amid the Boxer Rebellion and German colonial expansion in Shandong. Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out uses reincarnation and black comedy to trace rural China from the land reforms of 1950 through the Cultural Revolution and later economic changes. Frog, about China’s birth-control policies, also has substantial historical value, although it is better classified as a contemporary political novel covering recent history.