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Hong Kong Baptist University - Biography of Mo Yan
The Nobel Prize - Biography of Mo Yan

Mo Yan (born March 5, 1955, Gaomi, Shandong province, China) is a Chinese novelist and short-story writer renowned for his imaginative and humanistic fiction , which became popular in the 1980s. Mo was awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Guan Moye attended a primary school in his hometown but dropped out in the fifth grade during the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution . He participated in farmwork for years before he started to work in a factory in 1973. He joined the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in 1976 and began writing stories in 1981 under the pseudonym Mo Yan, which means “Don’t Speak.”

While studying literature at the PLA Academy of Art from 1984 through 1986, he published stories such as Touming de hongluobo (“Transparent Red Radish”) and Baozha (“Explosions”; Eng. trans. in Explosions and Other Stories ). His romantic historical story Honggaoliang (1986; “Red Sorghum”) was later published with four additional stories in Honggaoliang jiazu (1987; “Red Sorghum Family”; Red Sorghum ). It won him widespread fame, especially after its adaptation into a film of the same name (1987).

In Mo’s subsequent work he embraced various approaches—from myth to realism , from satire to love story—but his tales were always marked by an impassioned humanism. In 1989 his novel Tiantang suantai zhi ge ( The Garlic Ballads ) was published, followed in 1995 by the collection Mo Yan wenji (“Collected Works of Mo Yan”). Of the stories contained in the latter book, Mo himself was most satisfied with Jiuguo (1992; The Republic of Wine ). The novel Fengru feitun (1995; Big Breasts and Wide Hips ) caused some controversy, both for its sexual content and for its failure to depict class struggle according to the Chinese Communist Party line. Mo was forced by the PLA to write a self-criticism of the book and to withdraw it from publication (many pirated copies remained available, however).

Mo left his position in the PLA in 1997 and worked as a newspaper editor, but he continued writing fiction, with his rural hometown as the setting for his stories. He admitted that he had been greatly influenced by a wide array of writers such as William Faulkner , James Joyce , Gabriel García Márquez , Minakami Tsutomu, Mishima Yukio , and Ōe Kenzaburō . His later works included the collection of eight stories Shifu yue lai yue mo (2000; Shifu, You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh ) and the novels Tanxiang xing (2001; Sandalwood Death ), Shengsi pilao (2006; Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out ), and Wa (2009; Frog ). Wan shu de ren (2020; A Late Bloomer ) contains 12 novellas.

Mo also wrote plays, including Women de Jing Ke ( Our Jing Ke ) and Bawang bieji (“Farewell My Concubine”), both published in 2012. In 2023 he published E Yu (“Crocodile”), which centers on a corrupt government official and features a 4-meter- (13-foot-) long crocodile that can talk. A production of the play was set to tour China in 2024. In March of that year, Mo was the subject a lawsuit filed by nationalist Chinese blogger Wu Wanzheng, who had been campaigning against Mo online and accusing the Nobel laureate of distorting Chinese history in his works. In the lawsuit, Wu claimed that Mo had smeared the country’s Communist heroes and martyrs , and he demanded that Mo be made to apologize and to pay damages of one yuan each to every Chinese citizen. He also demanded that Mo’s books be removed from circulation. Wu’s suit was based on a law passed in 2018 that made insulting China’s heroes and martyrs a crime punishable by as much as three years in prison. However, at the time the lawsuit was filed, there was no indication that the Chinese government was in agreement with Wu’s accusations.

Mo Yan Biography

Birthday: February 17 , 1955 ( Aquarius )

Born In: Gaomi, Shandong, China

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Also Known As: Yan Mo, Guan Moye

Age: 69 Years , 69 Year Old Males

Spouse/Ex-: Du Qinlan

father: Yifan Guan

siblings: Moxian Guan, Moxin Guan

children: Guan Xiaoxiao

Nobel Laureates In Literature Novelists

education: 1991 - Beijing Normal University

awards: Nobel Prize in Literature 2012

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See the events in life of Mo Yan in Chronological Order

How To Cite

Sometime in the late 1960s or early seventies, a neighbor told Guan Moye about a writer he knew whose work was so popular that he could afford to eat jiaozi —“those tasty little pork dumplings

—Courtesy Peg Skorpinski

Sometime in the late 1960s or early seventies, a neighbor told Guan Moye about a writer he knew whose work was so popular that he could afford to eat jiaozi —“those tasty little pork dumplings”—at every meal. For Guan, who was born in 1955 in the rural county of Gaomi, China, and had grown up knowing almost nothing but the devastating privations that followed in the wake of the Great Leap Forward, the story was an inspiration. “That’s all I needed to know,” he later wrote; “become a writer and you can eat meaty jiaozi three times a day. Life doesn’t get any better than that. Why, not even the gods could do better. That’s when I made up my mind to become a writer someday.”

“Someday” came a few years later, when Guan was accepted to the People’s Liberation Army Academy of Art and Literature. While he was still a student, he began to publish his work under the pen name Mo Yan. His first novella, A Transparent Radish (1984), brought him to the attention of Chinese literary circles. His second, Red Sorghum (1986), propelled him from modest notoriety to national, and then international, fame.

Set before and during the Second Sino-Japanese War, Red Sorghum tells the story of an on-again-off-again couple, refracted through the vivid imagination of their grandson, the book’s unnamed narrator. It begins in 1939 with “Father,” age fifteen, running with “Grandfather” to join a group of Chinese resistance fighters lying in ambush for the invading Japanese. The action proceeds quickly and sequentially for several paragraphs, giving the impression of a straightforward family chronicle, before suddenly collapsing around a strange, dreamlike image of the narrator himself, as a child, playing war, and, in fact, already fantasizing about the events that will occupy the novella:

That was how Father rushed toward the uncarved granite marker that would rise above his grave in the bright-red sorghum fields of his hometown. A bare-assed little boy once led a white billy goat up to the weed-covered grave, and as it grazed in unhurried contentment, the boy pissed furiously on the grave and sang out: “The sorghum is red—the Japanese are coming—compatriots, get ready—fire your rifles and cannons—” Someone said that the little goatherd was me, but I don’t know.

What follows this moment of colliding temporalities is a long series of rhythmic cuts, flashes forward and backward in time, as the narrator conjures fragments from the war and from his grandparents’ budding romance years earlier, gradually building to scenes of staggering violence and bursting sensuality. The effect, says Howard Goldblatt, a scholar of Chinese literature at Notre Dame and Mo Yan’s English translator, is to draw “attention to the way the past is reconstructed,” to question historiography.

Over the last three decades, Mo Yan has consistently pushed his craft into new realms of experimentation. In Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (2006), he charts a massive saga through the intertwined lives of the friends, relatives, and enemies of a landlord named Ximen Nao. The twist? Ximen Nao is murdered at the beginning of the novel, in 1949, a victim of the Land Reform movement, and the subsequent years, 1950 to 2000, are told largely from the various perspectives of his reincarnations as a donkey, an ox, a pig, a monkey, and, finally, a boy with an abnormally large head. The conceit gives rise to any number of fantastic—and allegorical—interludes. In one memorable chapter, for instance, Ximen Nao, reincarnated as Pig Sixteen, starts a fight with another boar over leadership of the Apricot Garden Pig Farm herd:

I jumped out of the way and, with a good eye and quick hoof, snatched up the hat by its brim, and reared back until I was standing up straight. Holding my free hoof up in the air, I spun around and, with the gathered momentum, flung the hat and its apricot contents like a discus thrower. The golden yellow hat curved in a beautiful arc on its way to the moon. Suddenly, the strains of a moving straw hat song filled the air above us: La-la-la—La-ya la-la-ya-la—Mama’s straw hat is flying la—Mama’s straw hat is flying to the moon—La-ya la-la-ya-la —The sows under the tree were joined in song by hundreds of pigs in the farm; some jumped out of their pens, while those that lacked the ability stood up with their hooves on the walls, and all of them gazed at the moon.

The swine chorus continues to sing for the duration of the fight, and the hat, impossibly, remains aloft, circling the moon, “gracefully, like a satellite.” The combatants’ maneuvers resonate in the cosmic dance of the hat and moon and in the descriptive verses of the folk song, elevating the bestial struggle for social dominance to an epic battle of heroes. There is, of course, an element of humor in the inflated rhetoric of the passage, but it is executed with undeniable lyrical artistry.

Mo Yan often appears in his own fiction, as a semi-autobiographical character; his narrators sometimes quote his other works, only to refute their reliability; characters paradoxically write and rewrite the very text in which they exist. In short, dazzling linguistic games seem to flow almost unstoppably from Mo Yan’s pen. If these games confuse, however, it isn’t for long. If they obscure some detail, it is by design. What is most impressive about Mo Yan’s work—and perhaps one of the reasons his name is so often mentioned as a possible future Nobel laureate—is the near seamlessness with which his stylistic experiments work within his narratives to draw out hidden emotional valences, to articulate discerning social critiques, and even to challenge his readers’ preconceptions of reality.

James Williford is a freelance writer in Washington, D.C.

Unidentified Civil War soldier in a New York Zouave uniform.

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The Two-Way

Chinese author, mo yan, awarded 2012 nobel prize in literature.

Eyder Peralta

Mo Yan, the Chinese author, was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature this morning.

Mo Yan. J. Kolfhaus, Gymn. Marientha hide caption

Mo Yan, the Nobel committee wrote, uses his "hallucinatory realism" to merge "folk tales, history and the contemporary."

"Through a mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspectives, Mo Yan has created a world reminiscent in its complexity of those in the writings of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, at the same time finding a departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition," the committee explained in its citation.

The 57-year-old writer is best known for his book Red Sorghum: A Novel Of China . The winner receives $1.2 million.

Update at 7:32 a.m. ET. Navigating The Censors:

Time Magazine has a great piece that looks at Mo Yan's life's work. Most of his literature is inspired by his hometown of Gaomi, Shandong province. And while much of it skirts the censors by taking place in the past, some of it like one of his most recent books, Frog, takes on controversial topics like China's one-child rule.

As Time explains, Mo Yan works his way around the edges of government censorship by using "the adroit subtlety of his magic-realist style."

Time reports:

"For Eric Abrahamsen, a Beijing-based translator of modern Chinese fiction, it is clear that Mo Yan engages in the complex calculus of what is and isn't permissible that faces every Chinese writer. There is nothing wrong with that: not every artist has the stomach for strident dissent and, having been banned in the past, Mo Yan has nothing to prove. But these days, says Abrahamsen, Mo Yan "knows exactly where the lines are and doesn't cross them." Discussion about the drawbacks of the one-child policy, and whether it should be rolled back, is now permissible in China, for example. "I think the reason the book got published now is because it's not controversial anymore," says Abrahamsen."

Update at 7:47 a.m. ET. Biography:

According to the biography published on the Nobel website , Mo Yan, who's real name is Guan Moye, was born in 1955.

It goes on to say:

"As a twelve-year-old during the Cultural Revolution he left school to work, first in agriculture, later in a factory. In 1976 he joined the People's Liberation Army and during this time began to study literature and write. His first short story was published in a literary journal in 1981. His breakthrough came a few years later with the novella Touming de hong luobo (1986, published in French as Le radis de cristal 1993)."

Nobel Prize in literature

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MO Yan／ Grand Prize 2006

Grand Prize 2006 [17th]

--> Writer Born Fabruary 17, 1955 （aged51）

Mr. Mo Yan is one of the leading figures in contemporary Chinese literature. His works depict the reality of life in China’s cities and farming villages with a unique blend of realism and fantasy, blazing a trail into the future for Asian literature. He is the standard bearer not only for Chinese literature today, but also the literature of Asia and the world.

The details of title, age, career and award citation are at the time of announcement of the Prize.

Award Citation

Mr. Mo Yan is one of the leading figures in contemporary Chinese literature. His works depict the reality of life in China's cities and farming villages with a unique blend of realism and fantasy, and have been translated into many languages, blazing a trail into the future for Asian literature. He is the standard bearer not only for Chinese literature today, but also the literature of Asia and the world. Mr. Mo Yan was born in 1955 to a family of farmers in Gaomi, Shandong Province, China. He left primary school due to the Cultural Revolution. After working as a cow herder, farmhand, and a temporary laborer in factories, Mr. Mo Yan joined the People's Liberation Army. He began his writing career in the 1980s. The themes that he has continuously depicted were discovered within himself. They focus on China's poverty-stricken farming villages and the people who live there. The author continues to create a unique literary world by blending narrative expression from the traditional Chinese literary arts with the avant-garde methods derived from modern Western literature. Mr. Mo Yan published Hong Gaoliang Jiazu (Red Sorghum: A Novel of China) in 1987. Set in an agricultural village during the war against Japan, the novel was turned into a movie by director Zhang Yimou that won the Golden Bear for Best Film at the Berlin International Film Festival. This literary work, firmly rooted in the vast spaces of China, garnered international attention. His work continued with the publication of Jiuguo(The Republic of Wine) and other novels. He was catapulted into the vanguard of contemporary Chinese literature, while gaining international recognition as a novelist after many of his works were translated into English, Korean, Spanish, German, Japanese, French, Vietnamese, and other languages. The author insists that his work is not an imitation of Western novels, but the creation of novels that incorporate the reality of today's China. He declared, "It is meaningless to follow others. If everyone heads West, then I will head East." He is not merely guiding Chinese literature, but demonstrating the spirit to drive into the future the literature of Asia that has been bound by the stifling influence of modern Western literature and the weight of history and tradition. His works represent the successful creation of a literary universe by alternating scenes of his hometown of Gaomi, a remote agricultural area, with the literary space of fantasy. Though they depict people and a place deeply rooted in the soil and culture of China, readers throughout the world can readily identify with them. This makes Mr. Mo Yan's novels international literature in the true sense of the world. A son of the vastness of China, Mr. Mo Yan has used literature to employ the richness and diversity of culture and the complexity and potential of human society. He has opened a path from Asia to the world, in the process demonstrating the significance of Asian culture to the world. He is indeed worthy of the Grand Prize of the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prizes.

Biography of MO Yan (PDF)（PDF, 496.7KB）

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Introducing Mo Yan

Our library currently holds six major works by Mo Yan, plus the film, Red Sorghum . A complete collection of Mo Yan’s works in Chinese and other English translations are on order and will be available shortly. For commentaries and criticism of his works, you can check the library databases for literary studies . For literary criticism in Chinese, you can search China Academic Journals Full Text Database , or Duxiu . Enjoy!

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The Writer Mo Yan: His Life and Most Important Works

Mo Yan Life

Mo Yan (莫言), which literally means “nothing to say”, is the pseudonym for Guan Moye (管谟业), an affirmed writer and essayist known worldwide, especially for having won a Nobel prize for literature in 2012 thanks to his ability to merge popular stories, history and modernism with a strong hallucinatory realism. During his infancy, Mo Yan would usually listen to stories of popular tradition and folklore narrated by his grandmother.

Ever since , Mo Yan has over the years gifted to the world a copious amount of works . His pseudonym when extrapolated from the context might seem a bit contradictory, since he has lots of things to say; and Mo Yan himself recounts that during that period it was a real necessity to have one, since otherwise you could incur problems.

The choice of “nothing to say” was from a reminder from his parents who told him not to speak during the Cultural Revolution or risk running into trouble thanks to his loose talkativeness: not everyone knows that during that decade, an out of place word could cost one their freedom or even their life.

Mo Yan tells us that when he was little he was small and poor, a rascal whose cleverness always turned against him; in fact, when he wrote a story entitled Big Mouth, the child protagonist was modeled after himself.

Mo Yan was born into a family of peasants on February 2, 1955 in Gaomi (高密), a small little Chinese city located in the eastern part of Shandong where the writer set several of his novels and stories.

Gaomi appears as a microcosm of rural China, extremely poor and full of trying circumstances; despite this, the bond between Mo Yan and his land is very strong: in his stories there are long and vivid descriptions of farming life and nature, not to mention a series of metaphors that came from his country life.

Mo Yan described Gaomi as: “ found in the extreme southeast of the region, inhabited by just a dozen families, a few houses with mud walls and straw roofs spread among the arms of the Jiao River. Although small, the village is crossed by a wide road of yellow earth along whose sides grew willows, cypresses, and lots of other trees that nobody knows the name of and whose foliage in the Autumn are filled with golden leaves. ”

While young, only ten/eleven years old, due to the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), he had to prematurely abandon his studies to dedicate himself to pasture farming, and then at about eighteen years old he worked in the manufacturing of cotton. Even though he was a simple worker at the local cotton mill, Mo Yan always had great ambitions and big dreams, so much so that he spent his entire salary on white gloves like those of divas in the cinema.

Between 1975 and 1976, Mo Yan enlisted in the People’s Liberation Army, ending up in a remote unit to cultivate the fields and to dream about dying in the War in Vietnam; in 1979, still in the People’s Liberation Army, he was admitted into the cultural and literary department from which he graduated in 1986 and where he would work until the time of his release in 1999. It was actually during this period that he produced some of his masterpieces.

Unlike many of his contemporary writers who were raised in cultured environments, Mo Yan is a writer of true peasant background, formed in the heart of the army where he personally lived through the difficult and not at all pleasant experiences that life brought him.

His first literary success came in 1981 with the publication of the story 透明的红萝卜 (touming de hongluobo), “The Clear Radish”: a story about an innocent young man who is completely indifferent to everything that surrounds him.

Mo Yan manages to gift the reader the image of a China that no longer exists, the China that smells of the “Orient” and of mystery; one not yet contaminated by globalization that sadly eliminates diversity. Among the writers that most influenced him are Gabriel García Márquez and Faulkner.

Mo Yan’s most distinctive works

Hong gaoliang jiazu 红高粱家族 “red sorghum”.

Red Sorghum, literally “The Red Sorghum Clan”, is one of the novels that’s most distinctive of Mo Yan, originally published in five parts between 1985 and 1986, to then be published in a single text in 1988. With realistic writing that also recalls the magical and bizarre, the book tells the story of a family from the Gaomi district over the course of time: from the banditry of the Twenties to the Japanese invasions of the Thirties and Forties, up to the time of the Cultural Revolution. The narration is through the eyes of a young child.

Mo Yan is able to evoke the fear of simple people, the rage of the peasants, the blood of the martyrs with the same redness as the fields of sorghum in bloom, with an unequaled vivid description. The fields of red sorghum form the backdrop of the entire story: in Autumn, as Mo Yan writes, these fields of sorghum sparkle like a sea of blood.

From among the stems of sorghum unfolds the story of Yu Zhan’Ao, the narrator’s grandfather and his beloved, Dai Fengliang, and their participation in the resistance to the Japanese occupation. Yu Zhan’Ao was an outlaw while the woman came from a wealthy family.

The story narrates the heroic resistance of the peasants against the Japanese enemy; even though the actions of the commoners were essentially heroic, the heroism isn’t the only thing that’s highlighted. It also brings to light the misery, desperation and violence that characterized their living conditions.

For this reason, this novel was also viewed as being critical and complaining. There are lots of characters in this novel: peasants, soldiers, Buddhist monks, suspected Daoist wizards.

As he did with the novel To live as Yu Hua , the great filmmaker Zhang Yimou made a film of this novel, which went on to win the “Golden Bear” award at the Berlin Festival of 1988.

Tangxiang Xing 檀香刑 “Sandalwood Death”

Sandalwood Death is my favorite of Mo Yan’s writings. A novel published in 2001, many consider it to be a typical story: it’s set in China of the 1900’s at the time of the Boxer Rebellion. The Boxers were a rebellion raised in China by a large number of popular Chinese organizations and a good number of schools for martial arts against the foreign invaders, which started in the Shandong region.

The novel’s protagonists are Sun Bing, a rebel who by chance finds himself leading a peasants’ revolt alongside the Boxers, and Zhao Jia, an expert on torture. These two masters will face off in the book, each with their own art, seeking to finish their own “work”.

Mo Yan is able to mix together the historical rebellion, a love story and terrible torture (the torture of the wooden sandal); the setting is once again historical: China has entered the Nineteen Hundreds at war with foreign powers and thrown into the political chaos that preceded the downfall of the Chinese Millennial Empire.

Mo Yan also includes a series of supernatural phenomenon in the book, legends from oral traditions passed on by the commoners. In particular, the job of executioner is described as if it were one of the most honorable jobs in the world: initially the executioner had to carry out his torture in front of the public as a warning to others not to commit any crimes; later, this work becomes an art, to the point that executioners are acclaimed as actual artists.

The book was written with all of Mo Yan’s mastery, so much so that some parts are vividly described in great detail (see the torture of five hundred cuts!) which will not allow you to read through quickly.

Shengsi pilao 生死疲劳 “Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out”

Shengsi pilao, literally “The Trouble of Living and Dying”, translated into various languages as “The Six Reincarnations of Ximen Nao”, is a novel that was published in 2006. Just like The Torture of the Wooden Sandal, this too is a historical novel that recounts China’s affairs in the second half of the Twentieth Century through the eyes of a landowner, one Ximen Nao 西门闹, who is executed (unfairly, according to him) by peasants during the Revolution.

Once executed, he ends up in the Kingdom of the Hereafter, where the great King Yama is waiting for him – ( you might remember him from Dragon Ball! ) – Lord of the Dead, who allows him to be reincarnated six times just because he’s sick of him.

Convinced that he’s been granted a pardon, Ximen Nao is instead deceived by King Yama: in fact he is reincarnated first as a donkey, then in order, a bull, a pig, a dog, a monkey and lastly a baby.

Ximen Nao, before returning to the land of the living, refuses to drink a concoction that would allow him not to remember what happened. Because of this, when Ximen Nao returns to the land of the living as something else, he remembers what he was in the previous life and sees everything as a series of things that absolutely can’t keep him down: all the animals that he is reincarnated as have ties to people that were part of Ximen Nao’s life. I’ll leave you to imagine what poor Ximen Nao discovers!

In the end Ximen Nao is reincarnated as a child, Lan Qiansui (Lan Thousand Years): it is actually this child with a small skinny body, unusually large head, excellent memory and silver tongue who starts telling this story… The story covers a period of fifty years, during which Ximen Nao manages to free himself from all resentment and every desire for revenge on those who “disrespected him”.

The backdrop of Ximen Nao’s story are the big and little changes that shook China in the arc of this half century: the agricultural reforms of the Great Leap Forward, to the Popular Communes of the Cultural Revolution, to the death of Mao Zedong and everything that took place up until 2000.

This novel was nominated for the Newman Prize for Chinese literature in 2009 by its English translator, Howard Goldblatt.

Wa 蛙 “Frog”

Frog is a novel published in 2009; the title is a phonetic play on words between two Chinese words that are distinguished only by a different tone: wa 蛙 “frog” and wa 娃 “children”.

This novel intends to denounce the one child policy, especially in the countryside: many people, in order to avoid the negative consequences for not respecting the one child policy had to carry out barbaric acts to cause abortions in women, even after 6/7 months of pregnancy.

The novel centers around the figure of Wan Xin 万心 (literally “Ten Thousand Hearts”), the midwife of Gaomi (birthplace of Mo Yan) who, before the one child policy had helped bring into the world all the children of the town thanks to her experience. The whole novel is narrated from Wan Zu’s 万足 (literally “Ten Thousand Feet”) point of view, who is Wan Xin’s grandson. Wan Zu was also born thanks to the abilities of Grandmother Wan Xin, who was practically venerated as the goddess of fertility, Songzi Niangniang 送子娘娘.

Halfway through the Sixties, Wan Xin is tasked with enforcing the one child policy and thereby has to severely control the number of births. So she starts practicing abortions and vasectomies with the same care and seriousness as when she helped give birth to babies.

Wan Xin couldn’t refuse this task because she was a presumed “suspect” in the eyes of the Party, so this was her chance to redeem herself in some way: you can say that she went from one extreme to the other. Over the years, in view of the policy, the campaign to control the number of births takes on a barbarous and violent nature to which the old midwife Wan Xin adapts to all too easily.

After years of barbarism, one night while on her way home Wan Xin hears the croaking of frogs which reminds her of the crying of newborn babies (in Chinese, the onomatopoeic sound to indicate a baby’s cry is actually “wa” just like the croaking!) and causes her to rethink her life. Sadly, even Wan Xin’s dear one must pay the consequences of her life choices.

Tiantang suantai zhi ge 天堂蒜薹之歌 “The Garlic Ballads”

This novel, published in 1988 and set the year before, centers around Tiantang 天堂 (literally “Paradise”), an imaginary place in China where a group of peasants are obligated by the Chinese Communist Party to cultivate garlic due to a completely failing agricultural plan that collapses the sale of garlic, leaving the peasants high and dry.

Reduced to hunger and exasperated, the peasants in this imaginary place (which should be located to the northeast of Gaomi) rebel and set off to storm the Party’s headquarters: they break into various offices and destroy all that they can get their hands on; among them are the protagonists, Gao Ma and Jinju who have to fight against very ancient practices such as arranged marriage in order to stay together.

Jinju was promised in marriage to an old sick man. When these two poor ones fall in love, Gao Ma and Jinju wind up being locked up and forced to undergo violence; unfortunately this is not only the destiny for Gao Ma and Jinju: many other families are unjustly imprisoned and forced into madness in filthy cells where hope does not exist.

Sadly, this novel doesn’t have a happy ending: many of the characters end up being brutally killed and others continue living worse off than they were before.

This too is a novel of criticism and complaint: in fact all the disorder stems from the indifference and abuses of the proponents of the Party. Mo Yan describes the rotting of the Party by comparing it to the garlic that rots under the sun, giving off the stench of putrefaction.

The title comes from the songs of the blind Zhang Kou, a local storyteller, which start each chapter as in classic popular literature (but you’ll also think of the novel of The Three Kingdoms).

Jiuguo 酒国 “The Republic of Wine”

The Republic of Wine is a satirical novel published in 1993 about the relationship the Chinese have with food and alcohol, as well as the corruption of government officials and excesses. The novel follows two narrative threads: one part is sort of like detective fiction; in the other we have a correspondence of letters between Mo Yan in person and an aspiring writer who says that they’re a big fan of his work, a certain Lidou, who has written a story about cannibalism.

The detective fiction thread follows the affairs of a 48 year old investigation inspector, Ding Gou’Er, who was sent into an area of rural China (The Land of Alcohol, in fact) to look into alleged acts of cannibalism: in the story it would seem that some select restaurants offer their clients the meat of newborns.

Inspector Ding Gou’Er is regularly invited by local authorities to huge banquets, and mesmerized by the fumes of alcohol, he can’t figure out if the meat being served as actually human flesh or a presentation to that effect. In short, reality and fiction knowingly mix in this work, and as was the case in Red Sorghum with the constant presence of sorghum, in Songs of Garlic with its continuous presence of garlic, in this piece wine is omnipresent.

Mo Yan has said that he wrote this novel as a result of a burst of anger after the events of Tian’An Men Square, almost to denounce the corruption that bogged China down in that time period.

Yang mao zhuanyehu 养猫专业户 “The Man Who Raised Cats and Other Stories”

The stories in this collection have a close relationship, both linguistically and thematically to Red Sorghum. This is why the setting of many of these stories are sorghum fields that give birth to wonders and a mysterious world of swarms of divine ducks, white colors, grass fish that came out of who knows where that dart among the green stems of sorghum, foxes that light up like trails of fire to indicate the way to those who are lost, and so on.

This is a landscape that, as we’ve already mentioned, is so beloved by Mo Yan: a rural and farming civilization far from globalization where misery and the difficulties of human affairs dominate, and a life of hardship, trouble and unrecognized effort are imposed.

Well, it’s an image of a China that sadly no longer exists, being supplanted by skyscrapers that get lost in the heavens and metros that shoot out at 300 kilometers an hour. For this love Mo Yan has toward the rural micro-world many scholars have defined him as a “writer of the roots”.

In this collection of stories, the protagonists are kids that see reality in different ways: all you have to do is close your eyes and even the most miserable stories become legends. Here are the titles contained in this work: The Old Rifle; The Dry River; The Dog and the Swing; Explosions; The Abandoned Newborn; The Tornado; The Blow; Popular Music; The Main Who Raised Cats.

Fengru feitun 丰乳肥臀 “Big Breasts & Wide Hips”

In 1995 Mo Yan published a novel that dealt with the story of a family called “Big Breasts & Wide Hips”. In this novel which is together a hymn to his mother, land and people, Mo Yan vividly describes in a neorealist style life in Shandong during the Thirties. The story gravitates around a woman and her eight daughters and one son, the Shangguan 上官 family.

Throughout the novel this family faces the joys and pains brought about by an extremely primordial rural land where doing anything is complicated. From a historical point of view, this novel retraces the events from the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), up until the period of opening reforms (1978).

Even though Mo Yan seeks to complain, in this novel he also expresses his deep respect and love for women. As a novel that immediately brought down the ire of censorship, it deserves to be read from the first to the last page, despite its great length. Mo Yan expressed himself this way: 你可以不看我所有的作品，但你如果要了解我，应该看我的《丰乳肥臀》 “you might not read everything I’ve written, but if you want to understand me, you have to read “Big Breasts, Large Hips”.

Other works

The following are other titles of works written by Mo Yan, and I’ll leave it up to you to do the pleasant task of reading them and discovering what they are about: 十三步 (shi san bu) “Thirteen Steps”; 食草家族 (shi cao jiazu) “The Herbivorous Family”; 红树林 (hong shulin) “Red Forest”; 四十一炮 (si shi yi pao) “Pow!”; 怀抱鲜花的女人 (huaibao xianhua de nv ren) “The Woman with Flowers”; 师傅越来越幽默 (shifu yue lai yue youmo) “Shifu, You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh”; 欢乐 (huanle) “Joy”; 与大师约会 (yu dashi yuehui) “Meeting the Masters”; 我们的荆轲 (women de jingke) “Our Jing Ke”; 碎语文学 (sui yuwenxue) “ Broken Philosophy”; 用耳朵阅读 (yong erduo yuedu) “Ears to Read”; 会唱歌的墙 (hui changge de qiang) “The Wall Can Sing”.

About The Author

Armando Turturici

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Mo Yan: China's reluctant Nobel laureate

Published 10 December 2012

Mo Yan is known as a man who shuns the limelight

On 11 October, when the Nobel Committee announced that they had decided to award this year's Nobel Prize for Literature to Mo Yan, the Chinese writer was in hiding in his hometown Gaomi, of Shandong province, some 600km (370 miles) from Beijing.

As there had already been intense speculation that he was the front-runner, Mo Yan braced himself for the media storm that confirmation of the win would bring.

With lightning speed it came. In the evening, up to 100 Chinese and foreign journalists converged on the village, some camping outside his house, all eager to hear from the first Chinese Nobel winner that the country could openly celebrate.

In a hastily-convened press conference, Mo Yan expressed his happiness and surprise at the win; he thought his works might have struck a chord with the committee because they reflected ordinary people's lives, Chinese culture and the national spirit.

He was asked about Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo. Mo Yan said he read some of his works in the 1980s, but not much after Liu turned to politics.

Mo Yan hoped Liu could be released soon, and that Liu could carry on with his research and writing. Mo's remarks were widely reported by the foreign media, but not in the Chinese media.

The Mo Yan band wagon

A man who shuns the limelight, Mo Yan hoped that the hype would die down in a month so he could return to writing.

But the country of 1.3bn people appears determined to celebrate him for as long as possible.

Messages of congratulation have poured in from high-ranking officials, fellow writers and ordinary people alike.

His village plans to renovate the Mo Yan Literature Museum, name the local primary school after him, and build a statue; they also hope to develop a themed tourist route, with lots of red sorghums planted along the way in a nod to one of his most famous novels.

A post office issued commemorative stamps, and Mo Yan's name and image have appeared in a wide range of products, from T shirts to spirit bottles.

After the writer expressed a desire to use his prize money to buy a house in Beijing, internet users advised him that 7.5m yuan ($1.2m, £750,000) wouldn't go very far, and a billionaire offered Mo a free house, which he declined.

Within days, his novels and short stories were flying off the shelves so quickly that they were out of stock in quite a few cities. And there have been two cases of copyright violations, in an attempt to cash in on his fame.

Fame has brought benefits as well headaches. A recent rich list of Chinese writers shows Mo Yan as the second richest writer in China, with annual royalties of $3.45 million in 2012.

So what does the man himself make of it all? When asked by the Chinese Central TV station if he was happy, Mo Yan replied: "I don't know".

"I am under a lot of pressure, and feeling very anxious. How can I be happy?" he explained.

"But if I say I am not happy, then it is a bit disingenuous. I just won the Nobel Prize, how can I say I am not happy"?

At his press conference on 6 December in Stockholm, he stressed that the Nobel Prize is a personal honour given to an individual rather than a country. This has gone down well with Chinese microbloggers who welcomed it as a departure from the default mode of "thanking my country".

True to his roots

Mo Yan was born in 1955 into a large peasant family, and like many of his generation he suffered the pain and anguish brought about by political turmoil as well as natural disasters.

He is quoted as saying that hunger and loneliness are his inspiration for writing, and indeed the majority of his writing is about rural life.

In a prolific career spanning 30 years, Mo Yan has produced 11 major novels, some 30 long stories and around 80 short stories.

There is no question that Mo Yan is held in high regard by many of his fellow writers.

Famous Chinese author Wang Meng says that Mo Yan is a representative writer of his generation; while Gao Hongbo says that Mo Yan's understanding of the Chinese culture is second to none. Writer Su Tong thinks Mo Yan won entirely on the merits of his writing.

But there has been criticism too.

Liao Yiwu, a dissident writer in Germany, says he is shocked that Mo Yan won, because he is too closely associated with the establishment.

UK-based writer in exile Ma Jian criticizes Mo Yan for not shouldering social responsibilities, as a famous writer can.

Others feel Mo Yan is too eager to please the authorities, citing his offer to copy Mao Zedong's work by hand in 2012 as an example.

Yet others try to understand Mo Yan as a writer and as a human being.

They think that Mo Yan avoids taking a political stand or criticising the government in order to survive in China, but he seems to be extremely critical of government policies in many of his literary works. Isn't that the way the majority of intellectuals live in China, they ask.

Mo Yan seems to be fully aware of the criticism and comments. He said in the Gaomi press conference that if the critics had read his works, they would have realised that he was writing under tremendous pressure, and he was taking a huge risk.

At the press conference in Stockholm on 6th December, Mo Yan refused to comment on Liu Xiaobo. When pressed on the matter by a Taiwanese journalist a stern-faced Mo Yan replied: "I have always been independent; if people want to force me to express an opinion, I won't do it".

This will be disappointing for those who hoped that with the Nobel under his belt, he would be more willing to take risks and take a stand on social issues,

The huge expectations piled on a Chinese Nobel laureate will be something Mo Yan just can't shake off.

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Mo Yan ( 莫言 ) is a famous contemporary Chinese writer. In 2012, He became the country's first Nobel Literature Prize laureate.

He took the second place in the 2012 Chinese Writers Rich List that was released on Nov. 29, 2012, having earned 21.5 million yuan ($3.45 million) in royalties. It is the first time Mo has made the annual list since 2006, when he was ranked 20th.

Born Guan Moye (管谟业), the author writes under the pen name Mo Yan, which means "don't speak" in Chinese.

Mo Yan was granted an honorary PhD of Arts by OUHK (Open University of Hong Kong) and was appointed guest professor at the Qingdao University of Technology. Relying on a series of country literary works, Mo's claim to fame came in the 1980s when he established a reputation for being a so-called root-seeking writer. His works were strongly influenced by magical realism and told the tales of numerous legends which took place in Gaomi, Shandong Province. Mo is renowned for his unique perceptions of reality, imaginative descriptions, de-familiarization processing, mysticism and a pioneering style.

Mo Yan was born on February 17, 1955 in Gaomi, Shandong Province . He attended primary school in his hometown and actually was forced to drop out because of China's Cultural Revolution. He was sent to the countryside where he had to perform manual labor for many years.

In 1976, Mo joined the PLA (China's People's Liberation Army) and held the posts of monitor, librarian, teacher and secretary.

In 1981, he started his writing career and published several early works such as "Dry River,""Autumn Stream"and "Folk Music."

In 1986, he graduated from the department of literature at the PLA Academy of Arts. 　

In 1991, he was granted a master's degree in literature and art from the Lu Xun Literature Institute at Beijing Normal University.

In 1997, his full-length novel "Big Breasts and Wide Hips"won the Da Jia Literature Prize, a money prize of 100,000 Yuan. Mo then left the army and started to work for regional newspaper Procuratorial Daily. He also wrote TV scripts for the department of film and television.

In 2000, his novel "Family Stories of Red Sorghum"was on the list of the 100 best Chinese fictional works of the 20th century, as selected by Asia Week. The movie "Red Sorghum,"directed by Zhang Yimou (张艺谋), was adapted from this novel and won the 38th Berlin Film Festival Golden Bear Award.

In 2001, "Sandalwood Penalty" was awarded with the prize of the "Best Literary Book for Readers," granted by Taiwan United Daily News. This novel also won the Ding Jun Double Year Prize for Literature in 2003.

Though missing out on the 2005 Mao Dun Literature Prize, Mo did win the second Mass Media Award for Chinese Literature for Outstanding Achievements for his novel "Forty-one Cannons."The Open University of Hong Kong later granted him an honorary PhD of Arts.

His first chapter book "Fatigue of Life and Death"got him the Fukuoka Asian Culture Award in 2006. According to the list of wealthiest Chinese writers published on December 15, 2006, Mo ranked twentieth, with his royalties amounting to 3.45 million Yuan. These facts and figures attracted wide public attention.

In July 2007, his collection of essays "Say It, Mo Yan", a representation of his spiritual journey, was published.

In 2008, "Fatigue of Life and Death"won first prize at the second Dream of the Red Chamber Awards.

In December 2009, Mo's full-length novel "The Frog" was published. The book features Mo's characteristically unique writing skills, containing four long letters and one drama. "The Frog" tells the story of a female country doctor who has been practicing gynecology for nearly 50 years. Set to the backdrop of the rural birth condition from the eyes of the obstetrician in six decades since the country's liberation, it represented the arduous and complicated course of controlling the Chinese population growth, creating an inspirational female protagonist and at the same time revealing the pain and difficulties of that age. On August 20, 2011, "the Frog"won the eighth Mao Dun Literature Prize.

Mo was appointed guest professor at the Qingdao University of Technology and was also selected to act as vice- chairman of the Chinese Writers' Association on November 2011.

The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2012 was awarded to Mo Yan, "who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary," the Swedish Academy announced in Stockholm on Oct. 11, 2012.

The Language and Cultural Press under Ministry of Education decided to add one of Mo's novella "A transparent carrot" in high school textbooks a couple of days after the annoucement for Mo's winning as the literary laureate.

He became the first director of the International Writing Center established by Beijing Normal University on May 13, 2013.

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Mo Yan (1955-)

Widely praised for the diversity and virtuosity of his output, Mo Yan is regarded as one of China’s most important and controversial novelists. His work encompasses a wide variety of literary traditions and genres, often combining social realism with elements of bizarre fabulation and magical realism. Lauded for both his social commentary and his visionary imagination, Mo was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012. While the award stirred up an initial wave of controversies, most of which accused him of political engagement with the Chinese government, scholars have moved in more recent years toward a depoliticization of his writings, reading them instead as a unique version of human experiences and opening them up to philosophical, aesthetic, and psychological interpretations.

Guan Moye was born into a rural farming family in Gaomi, Shandong Province, on 17 February 1955, the youngest of four surviving children. His childhood was marked by poverty and, during the Great Leap Famine of 1959-61, near-starvation. Following the advent of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, he was compelled to leave school and instead work various agricultural jobs. He had developed an interest in storytelling, inspired by the Chinese folktales he heard from his paternal grandfather and great-uncle. His pen name, Mo Yan (“Don’t Speak”), is derived from an admonition he often received from his parents because of the fraught sociopolitical circumstances of Maoist China. He began working in a cotton factory at the age of eighteen, and the following year he made the first of several attempts to enlist in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). He was finally accepted in 1976.

During his time in the military, Mo pursued his literary ambitions, completing a never-published six-act play in 1978. The following year he joined the Communist Party and married Du Qinlan. Their daughter, Guan Xiaoxiao, was born in 1981, the same year Mo’s first publication, a short story about the wife of a soldier titled “Chunye yu feifei” (“A Rainy Night in Spring”), appeared. He continued to publish short fiction over the next few years, and in 1984 he was admitted to the PLA’s Academy of Arts and Literature, graduating in 1986. His first novel, Hong gaoliang jiazu (1987; Red Sorghum ), comprised five novellas that had been published separately in magazines in 1986. The book’s critical and financial success, combined with widespread praise for a contemporaneous film adaptation directed by Zhang Yimou, established Mo’s reputation as a major author. He received a MA in literature from Beijing Normal University in 1991 and left the military in 1997. That same year, Mo joined the editorial staff of the Procuratorial Daily, the news organ of the Supreme People’s Procuratorate—the agency responsible for investigation and prosecution of crime in the People’s Republic of China.

Mo remained productive, writing short stories, novellas, essay collections, novels, dramas, and even an eighteen-episode television drama, Hong shulin (1999; Mangroves). His short story “Yueguang zhan” (2004; The Moonlight Blade) won the prestigious People’s Literature Best Short Story Award in 2004 and the Pu Songling Short Story Award in 2007. In 2004 he won the Arts and Literature Knight Medal of France and the Chinese Literature Media Prize. In 2005 he received the Premio Nonino of Italy and an honorary doctorate of letters from the Open University of Hong Kong. In 2006, Mo’s 540,000-character-long novel Shengsi pilao (2006; Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out ) was published to great acclaim after having been written in only forty-three days, winning the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize in the year of its publication and the Baptist University Dream of Red Chamber Jury Award in 2008.

In 2009 Mo was part of a delegation of one hundred Chinese writers to the Frankfurt Book Fair and spoke at the opening ceremony, describing his views on the Chinese government and the role of the fiction writer. That same year, he published his novel Wa ( Frog ) about the sinister effects of China’s one-child policy. In 2012, Mo was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature; in contrast to its condemnation of the awarding of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize to jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo and the 2000 literature prize to Gao Xingjian, who had gone into exile in France, the Chinese government openly celebrated Mo’s win. While some Chinese writers and activists criticized Mo’s selection on the grounds that he was too cooperative with the authorities, he was praised for speaking in favor of freeing Liu at a news conference. In a 2015 ChinaX interview with Harvard professor David Der-wei Wang (see Further Reading), Mo confirmed that he had changed his pseudonym to his official name so that he could continue to receive royalties for his work. Following his Nobel Prize win, Mo received six more honorary doctorates and continued to publish several collections of short stories and a screenplay. In recent years, he has avoided the limelight and claimed that he does not wish to be a public figure, though he still makes occasional public appearances and maintains a large following on social media, where he sometimes posts new works.

Major Works

Although Mo has written plays and essays to some acclaim, his reputation as a major literary figure is founded primarily upon his fiction. By far his most famous book is Red Sorghum, a novel composed of five linked novellas originally published separately in magazines in 1986. Set, like much of his other work, in Mo’s hometown of Gaomi, the novel tells the long, bloody story of the narrator’s family across three generations, focusing primarily on their involvement in the resistance against Japanese invaders in the 1930s but also incorporating material from earlier and later periods. The novel’s nonlinear structure, grotesque violence, and blending of Chinese history with narrative elements drawn from myth and folklore are characteristic of much of Mo’s work. The book likewise serves as an example of the author’s oft-stated mission of evoking a ground-level sense of history founded on ordinary lives rather than nationalistic ideology.

An increasing interest in metafictional experiments and absurdist satire is exemplified by Jiu guo (1992; The Republic of Wine ), the tale of a detective’s visit to the fictitious province of Liquorland in order to investigate allegations of cannibalism among the local elite, interwoven with a series of epistolary exchanges between an aspiring writer from Liquorland and Mo himself. A condemnation of human rapacity and excess, the novel has been hailed by many as Mo’s most ambitious and successful to date.

He continued his darkly comic appraisal of Chinese history and culture in Fengru feitun (1995; Big Breasts and Wide Hips ), which tells the story of Shangguan Lu Xuan’er, a rural woman who was orphaned as a baby during a raid by German soldiers. After her stepparents lead her to discover that her violent husband is sterile, Lu Xuan’er secretly has nine children by seven different fathers to fulfill her in-laws’ expectations. The youngest children are a twin brother and sister fathered by a Swedish pastor who was murdered by Nationalist soldiers. The blond, blue-eyed boy twin, her only son, is the narrator, relating his mother’s struggles against the waves of warfare, revolution, and hunger that haunt the region and result in the deaths of several daughters and grandchildren. He does not spare his family’s role as contributors to the collective madness or conceal his own physical and mental problems. When the Communists take power, succeeding the bandits, Western imperialists, and Nationalists, the effect is more disaster and pauperization, endless political campaigns, corruption, and brutal settling of private scores disguised as public legal proceedings.

Tanxiang xing (2001; Sandalwood Death ), written in commemoration of the one-hundredth anniversary of the Boxer Rebellion, reenacts a microhistory of the uprising, starting with a local conflict involving a Maoqiang opera singer and two German railway guards. The opera singer’s daughter, Sun Meiniang, engages in a painful, fruitless mission of reconciliation; she is caught among conflicting loyalties to her father, Sun Bing; her lover, Qian Ding, the district magistrate; and her husband, Zhao Xiaojia, who suffers from borderline intellectual functioning and whose father, Zhao Jia, is a retired imperial executioner. Mo’s decision to let Sun Meiniang, who is pregnant with her dead lover’s child, and her infantile husband survive the execution-ground massacre in the bloody finale of the work marks the couple as signifiers of a coming posttraumatic society. Mo’s timely choice of subject matter, the creative employment of linguistic codes and voices, as well as the structural eclecticism of the work received broad acclaim, although some critics complained about the excessive representations of violence and distortions of history.

The acclaimed novel Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out is structured based on the Buddhist concept of samsara—the indefinitely repeated cycles of birth, misery, and death caused by karma. The novel uses a traditional storytelling style rather than a conventional modern one, giving the work an epic quality. The protagonist, Ximen Nao, a noble landowner from Gaomi, is executed during Mao Zedong’s land reform movement in 1948 so that his land may be redistributed to peasants. He finds himself after death in the underworld, tortured by Lord Yama, considered in Buddhist mythology to be the wrathful judge of the dead. During his torture, Ximen maintains that he has led a completely benevolent life and refuses to admit any guilt, so Lord Yama sends him back to earth as punishment, where he is reincarnated repeatedly as a donkey, an ox, a pig, a dog, a monkey, and ultimately as a human again. In these new bodily forms, he observes the political movements that transform China under Communist Party rule, through New Year’s Eve in 2000. The novel functions on one level as a strict documentary of the latter half of the twentieth century in China, on another level as an allegory of postrevolutionary Chinese society with its distinctive obsessions and anxieties. A third narrative layer develops ideas about personal as well as social accountability that implicitly critiques the excessive exploitation of natural resources.

Critical Reception

While Mo is one of China’s most acclaimed authors, he has also been one of its most controversial. Though there is a tendency to see him as a dissident writer, his major literary accomplishment is the creation of an alternative way of writing modern history that deviates from the official method that emphasizes a critical approach to the values and political correctness endorsed by the government and a dedication to the peoples’ everyday history—their suffering, their struggle, and a search for the meaning of life. Shelley W. Chan (2000; see Further Reading) traced the changes in Mo’s writing represented by Red Sorghum and Big Breasts and Wide Hips, arguing that the former is still a patriarchal work despite the fact that it departs from Maoist historiography by blurring the boundaries between good and bad as well as old and new. The latter, she suggested, breaks from the confines of the Maoist patriarchal tradition in its celebration of motherhood. Michael S. Duke (1993; see Further Reading) concentrated on Tiantang suantai zhi ge (1988; The Garlic Ballads ) and Mo’s short stories written in the 1980s, asserting that in these works the author deviates from Maoist socialist realism and demonstrates continuity with the anti-imperialist May Fourth tradition. Duke contended that while the novel portrays peasants as active historical agents, the stories focus instead on their passivity and pain, which is caused by political and economic oppression rather than by traditional culture. Xudong Zhang (2008; see Further Reading) studied this notion that the Communist Party is the root of problems rather than the solution, treating the satirical novel Republic of Wine as an allegorical labyrinth that enables readers to make sense of the chaotic era of the 1990s, which was driven by the “demonic” market economy, corruption, and cannibalistic desire. Zhang declared that the novel provides a dwelling “where the fragmented realities of postsocialist China find their own formal and moral certainty, even meaningfulness.” Demonstrating how violence in Mo’s work is described in a highly graphic and disturbing way, Tonglu Li (2016) centered on the protagonist of Tanxiang xing, his enjoyment of everyday life, his involuntary engagement in the violent Boxer Rebellion, and his eventual decision to choose death over life.

The emphasis on body and bodily desires have also become central to a discussion of Mo’s writing. David Der-wei Wang (2000; see Further Reading) provided a guide to understanding the divergent and heterogeneous “historical space” that Mo created in his works. Wang discussed the ways in which Mo “three-dimensionalize[s] a linear historical narrative and imagination” by shifting to unofficial histories, emphasizing bodily experiences, and crossing all forms of boundaries. Howard Goldblatt (2000; see Further Reading) studied the cannibalism in The Republic of Wine through the lens of cultural anthropology and the history of cannibalism in China. Goldblatt depicted the novel as a parody of the May Fourth attack on the cannibalistic nature of Chinese traditions. Yang Xiaobin (1998; see Further Reading) suggested that The Republic of Wine was created as an allegory of the “extravaganza of decline,” and has multiple layers of meaning. Yang alleged that the novel’s criticism of the decadent extrinsic sociopolitical and cultural environment is only made possible by a criticism of the intrinsic violence the nation both “enjoys and suffers.” The crisis of the represented world thus simultaneously becomes the crisis of representation itself. Mo’s use of animals, particularly in Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, has received attention for its transcendence of the anthropocentric concept of history, enabling readers to perceive life in a broader way. Chengzhou He (2018; see Further Reading) investigated philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s notion that an act that destabilizes the current order will eventually be undone. He focused on the continuous reincarnation of humans and animals in the novel, maintaining that it illuminates a concurrent process in which “the dis-eventualization of the political events coexists with the eventualization of the ecological consciousness.”

Religion, both institutional and folk, has been an emphasis in Mo’s work and the criticism surrounding it. Yiju Huang (2016) argued that Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out offers an understanding of the self and its traumatic formation that serves as an alternative to Western trauma theories. Huang focused on the concept of reincarnation in the novel, using Buddhist ideology to explore how rebirth illuminates a “self” that travels through different forms of life, eventually transcending obsession and desire. Chi-ying Alice Wang (2014) disputed the influence of magical realism or other recent literary trends on Mo, urging instead that his literary creativity should be traced back to the antiquity of China. Wang examined The Garlic Ballads and Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out as examples of how commonly shared literary, folk, and religious traditions work within the framework of the two novels.

James Overholtzer. " Mo Yan ." Contemporary Literary Criticism , edited by Jennifer Stock, vol. 478, Gale, 2021.

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Mo Yan Biography

Guan Moye, better known as Mo Yan in the literary world, is a renowned Chinese novelist and short-story writer. Despite being born into a poor farming family, he defied the odds and carved a successful literary career solely based on his exceptional talent. Mo Yan’s writing style is diverse and cannot be easily categorized, drawing inspiration from various writers and incorporating elements of older Chinese literature and contemporary social issues. His imaginative and humanistic fiction gained popularity in the 1980s, and he achieved international recognition with his epic novel ‘Red Sorghum’. In 2012, he was honored with the prestigious Nobel Prize in Literature. Additionally, many of his works have been adapted into internationally acclaimed movies.

Quick Facts

Also Known As: Yan Mo, Guan Moye
Age: 68 Years, 68 Year Old Males
Spouse/Ex-: Du Qinlan
Father: Yifan Guan
Siblings: Moxian Guan, Moxin Guan
Children: Guan Xiaoxiao
Nobel Laureates In Literature
Education: 1991 – Beijing Normal University
Awards: Nobel Prize in Literature 2012

Childhood & Early Life

Guan Moye was born on 5th March 1955 and grew up in Gaomi in Shandong province in north-eastern China in a poor farming family. He dropped out in the fifth grade of a primary school in his hometown during the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. He participated in farm work for years and then started working in a cotton factory in 1973. He joined the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in 1976. His writing stint started in 1981 with short stories. This was the time when he adopted his pen name ‘Mo Yan’, which means “Don’t Speak.”

From 1984 to 86 he studied literature at the PLA Academy of Art. During this period, he published stories such as ‘Touming de hongluobo’ (Transparent Red Radish) and ‘Baozha’ (Explosions). This was a turning point in his literary life. In 1986, he wrote a romantic historical story ‘Honggaoliang’ (Red Sorghum). In 1987, this story was published with four additional stories in ‘Honggaoliang jiazu’ (Red Sorghum Family). In his later works he handled various approaches—from myth to realism, from satire to love story—but his tales were always marked by an impassioned humanism. In 1989 his novel ‘Tiantang suantai zhi ge’ (The Garlic Ballads) and ‘Shisan bu’ (Thirteen Steps) were published. In 1992, the collection of stories ‘Jiuguo’ (The Republic of Wine) came out. His novel ‘Shicao jiazu’ (The Herbivorous Family) was published in 1994, whereas in 1995, ‘Mo Yan wenji’ (Collected Works of Mo Yan) was published. His 1995 novel ‘Fengru feitun’ (Big Breasts and Wide Hips) caused some controversy, both for its sexual content and for its failure to depict class struggle according to the Chinese Communist Party line. Mo was forced by the PLA to write a self-criticism of the book and to withdraw it from publication. However, many pirated copies of this book remained available. After this incidence, he left his position in the PLA in 1997. Later he worked as a newspaper editor and continued writing fiction, with his rural hometown as the setting for his stories. His novel ‘Tanxiangxing’, published in 2004, narrates a story of human cruelty in the crumbling Empire. This book was translated in English as ‘Sandalwood Death’ in 2013. The 2006 novel ‘Shengsi pilao’ uses black humour to describe everyday life and the violent transmogrifications in the young People’s Republic. In 2008, this book was translated as ‘Life and Death are Wearing Me Out’ in English. His later works include the collection of eight stories ‘Shifu yue lai yue mo’ (‘Shifu, You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh’). This book has been adapted for a film ‘Happy Times’. This film won the ‘Fipresci Prize’ and the ‘Silver Spike’ at the Valladolid International Film Festival in 2000. His book ‘Shengsi pilao’ has been translated in English as ‘Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out’ in 2006. His latest novel ‘Wa’ (translated as ‘Frog’ in English), published in 2009, discusses the consequences of China’s imposition of a single-child policy. Mo Yan’s another short story ‘The White Dog and The Swing’ was adopted for film ‘Nuan’ in 2003. This film won ‘Grand Prix’ at 16th Tokyo International Film Festival 2004.

Major Works

One of his most acclaimed novels is ‘The Red Sorghum Family’, published in 1987. This book gave him fame and recognition as a writer. It was adopted into a film of the same name in 1987. The film won the Golden Bear Award at the 1987 Berlin International Film Festival – the first major international prize awarded to a post-Mao Chinese film. The book consists of five stories that unfold and interweave in Gaomi in several turbulent decades in the 20th century, with depictions of bandit culture, the Japanese occupation and the harsh conditions endured by poor farm workers. This novel was selected by the magazine ‘World Literature Today’ as one of the ‘Top 40’ in its first 75 years of publication and as the best of 1987.

Awards & Achievements

He was one of finalists for ‘Neustadt International Prize for Literature’ awarded in 1998. ‘Kiriyama Prize’ for notable books was awarded to Mo Yan’s book ‘Big Breasts and Wide Hips’ in 2005. Open University of Hong Kong, in 2005, conferred ‘Doctor of Letters’ degree upon him. He won ‘Newman Prize for Chinese Literature’ in 2009 for his book ‘Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out’. In 2010, he became the ‘Honorary Fellow’ of the ‘Modern Language Association’. His translated book ‘Frog’ brought him ‘Mao Dun Literature Prize’ in 2011. He received the highest honor in literature – ‘The Nobel Prize in Literature’ in 2012.

Personal Life & Legacy

Mo Yan married Du Qinlan in 1979. They have a daughter Guan Xiaoxiao born in 1981. His daughter manages all his business and public relation affairs including copyright issues.

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Mo Yan - Bibliography

Bibliography


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/ edited by Janice Wickeri. – Hong Kong : Research Centre for Translations, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1991
: / translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt. – New York : Viking, 1993. – Translation of Hong gaoliang jiazu
: / translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt. – New York : Viking, 1995. – Translation of Tiantang suantai zhi ge
/ translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt. – New York : Arcade Pub., 2000. – Translation of Jiuguo
/ translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt. – New York : Arcade Pub., 2001. – Translation of Shifu yuelai yue youmo
/ translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt. – New York : Arcade Pub., 2004. – Translation of Fengru feitun
: / translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt. – New York : Arcade Pub., 2008. – Translation of Shengsi pilao
/ translated by Howard Goldblatt. – London : Seagull, 2010. – Translation of Bian
/ translated by Howard Goldblatt. – London : Seagull, 2013
/ translated by Howard Goldblatt. – Norman : Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 2013. – Translation of Tanxiangxing
/ translated by Howard Goldblatt. – Hong Kong : The Chinese University Press, 20-?. – (Announced but not yet published)

The Swedish Academy, 2012

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Mo Yan
Mo Yan. Guan Moye ( simplified Chinese: 管谟业; traditional Chinese: 管謨業; pinyin: Guǎn Móyè; born 5 March 1955 [1] ), better known by the pen name Mo Yan ( / moʊ jɛn /, Chinese: 莫言; pinyin: Mò Yán ), is a Chinese novelist and short story writer. Donald Morrison of U.S. news magazine TIME referred to him as "one of the most ...
Mo Yan
Mo Yan (born March 5, 1955, Gaomi, Shandong province, China) is a Chinese novelist and short-story writer renowned for his imaginative and humanistic fiction, which became popular in the 1980s.Mo was awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature.. Guan Moye attended a primary school in his hometown but dropped out in the fifth grade during the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution.
Mo Yan
Mo Yan - The Story of My Life. I was born on the 25 of March 1956* into a peasant family in the Ping'an Village Production Brigade of the Heya People's Commune, Northeast Gaomi Township, Shandong Province, the People's Republic of China. The youngest of four children, I have two older brothers and a sister. Since my father and his ...
Mo Yan
Mo Yan was born to a farming family in Shandong Province, China. After only a few years of schooling, he began work as a cattle herder at the age of 11. As a young man, Mo Yan enlisted in the army, where his literary talent was first discovered. He published his first novel in 1981 and went on to achieve his international breakthrough with the ...
Mo Yan Biography
Mo Yan. Guan Moye (known as Mo Yan in literary world) is a Chinese novelist and short-story writer. He is a multifaceted novelist whose work cannot be easily stereotyped. Being born and brought up in a poor farming family, his path to a literary career was not clear-cut and his achievements are purely based on his talent.
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2012
Biobibliographical notes. Mo Yan (a pseudonym for Guan Moye) was born in 1955 and grew up in Gaomi in Shandong province in north-eastern China. His parents were farmers. As a twelve-year-old during the Cultural Revolution he left school to work, first in agriculture, later in a factory. In 1976 he joined the People's Liberation Army and ...
Mo Yan 101
Mo Yan 101. Sometime in the late 1960s or early seventies, a neighbor told Guan Moye about a writer he knew whose work was so popular that he could afford to eat jiaozi —"those tasty little pork dumplings"—at every meal. For Guan, who was born in 1955 in the rural county of Gaomi, China, and had grown up knowing almost nothing but the ...
Mo Yan's 'Hallucinatory Realism' Wins Literature Nobel : NPR
Mo Yan's 'Hallucinatory Realism' Wins Literature Nobel The Swedish Academy praised the Chinese writer's work, which "merges folk tales, history and the contemporary." The award is a cause of pride ...
Chinese Author, Mo Yan, Awarded 2012 Nobel Prize In Literature
October 11, 20127:23 AM ET. Eyder Peralta. Mo Yan, the Chinese author, was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature this morning. Mo Yan. J. Kolfhaus, Gymn. Marientha. Mo Yan, the Nobel committee ...
MO Yan
Writer. Born Fabruary 17, 1955 （aged51）. Mr. Mo Yan is one of the leading figures in contemporary Chinese literature. His works depict the reality of life in China's cities and farming villages with a unique blend of realism and fantasy, blazing a trail into the future for Asian literature. He is the standard bearer not only for Chinese ...
Introducing Mo Yan
Introducing Mo Yan. The Nobel Prize in Literature 2012 was awarded to the Chinese author, Mo Yan. Mo Yan is perhaps best known to the Western audience through a successful film adaptation of one of his early works, Red Sorghum, by one of China's most prominent film directors, Zhang Yimou . Born in 1955 in Gaomi, Shandong Province, an ...
Mo Yan
Guan Moye ( simplified Chinese: 管谟业; traditional Chinese: 管謨業; pinyin: Guǎn Móyè; born 17 February 1955), better known by the pen name Mo Yan ( / moʊ jɛn /, Chinese: 莫言; pinyin: Mò Yán ), is a Chinese novelist and short story writer. He is best known to Western readers for his 1987 novel Red Sorghum Clan. In 2012, Mo was ...
The Writer Mo Yan: His Life and Most Important Works
Mo Yan Life. Mo Yan (莫言), which literally means "nothing to say", is the pseudonym for Guan Moye (管谟业), an affirmed writer and essayist known worldwide, especially for having won a Nobel prize for literature in 2012 thanks to his ability to merge popular stories, history and modernism with a strong hallucinatory realism. ...
Mo Yan: China's reluctant Nobel laureate
10 December 2012. Mo Yan is known as a man who shuns the limelight. By Yuwen Wu. BBC Chinese. On 11 October, when the Nobel Committee announced that they had decided to award this year's Nobel ...
2012 Nobel Prize in Literature
Nobel Prize in Literature. · 2013 →. The 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the Chinese writer Mo Yan (born 1955) "who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary." [1] He is the second Chinese author to win the prize after the exiled Gao Xingjian.
China Wiki
Mo is renowned for his unique perceptions of reality, imaginative descriptions, de-familiarization processing, mysticism and a pioneering style. Biography. Mo Yan was born on February 17, 1955 in Gaomi, Shandong Province. He attended primary school in his hometown and actually was forced to drop out because of China's Cultural Revolution.
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2012
Mo Yan's characters bubble with vitality and take even the most amoral steps and measures to fulfil their lives and burst the cages they have been confined in by fate and politics. Instead of communism's poster-happy history, Mo Yan describes a past that, with his exaggerations, parodies and derivations from myths and folk tales, is a ...
Mo Yan
Mo Yan (1955-) Widely praised for the diversity and virtuosity of his output, Mo Yan is regarded as one of China's most important and controversial novelists. His work encompasses a wide variety of literary traditions and genres, often combining social realism with elements of bizarre fabulation and magical realism. Lauded for both his social ...
Mo Yan
Mo Yan is a Chinese novelist and short story writer who was awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature. Mr. Mo was born in 1955 in Gaomi, China. The name Mo Yan is a pseudonym for his given name ...
Mo Yan
[Mo Yan] I feel so surprised … when I heard this, because I considered the Nobel Prize in Literature to be far away from me. [YSL] Many of Nobelprize.org's visitors are high school students, which of your books would be a good starting point for a young person or newcomer to your work?
Mo Yan Biography, Life & Interesting Facts Revealed
Mo Yan Biography. January 18, 2024 by 2gqci. Guan Moye, better known as Mo Yan in the literary world, is a renowned Chinese novelist and short-story writer. Despite being born into a poor farming family, he defied the odds and carved a successful literary career solely based on his exceptional talent. Mo Yan's writing style is diverse and ...
Mo Yan
Nobel Prizes 2023. Eleven laureates were awarded a Nobel Prize in 2023, for achievements that have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind. Their work and discoveries range from effective mRNA vaccines and attosecond physics to fighting against the oppression of women. See them all presented here.

Mo Yan Biography

Sometime in the late 1960s or early seventies, a neighbor told Guan Moye about a writer he knew whose work was so popular that he could afford to eat jiaozi —“those tasty little pork dumplings

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The Writer Mo Yan: His Life and Most Important Works

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Mo Yan’s most distinctive works

Tangxiang Xing 檀香刑 “Sandalwood Death”

Shengsi pilao 生死疲劳 “Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out”

Wa 蛙 “Frog”

Tiantang suantai zhi ge 天堂蒜薹之歌 “The Garlic Ballads”

Jiuguo 酒国 “The Republic of Wine”

Yang mao zhuanyehu 养猫专业户 “The Man Who Raised Cats and Other Stories”

Fengru feitun 丰乳肥臀 “Big Breasts & Wide Hips”

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