Mo Yan

Mo Yan is a Chinese novelist and screenwriter, born on 17 February 1955 in Gaomi, in Shandong province, in the People's Republic of China. Mo Yan is a pen name, often translated as "don't speak". He grew up in the countryside and left school early, and rural life shaped much of his fiction. He later joined the army and began publishing in the 1980s. His stories are set largely in a imagined version of his home district, Northeast Gaomi Township, where history, folklore, hunger, cruelty and humour meet. He mixes vivid, earthy realism with fantastic and comic touches, and is often compared with writers of magical realism. His novels follow families and villages through the upheavals of twentieth-century China. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012, and his work has been widely translated, though his relationship to official authority has drawn debate.