Yan Lianke

Yan Lianke is a Chinese novelist and satirist, born on 24 August 1958 in Song County, in Henan province, in the People's Republic of China. He grew up in a poor farming area and later served in the People's Liberation Army, where he began to write. He is known for fiction that mixes sharp political satire with fable, dark comedy and strange, dreamlike imagery, a style he has described as mythorealism.

His novels often look at rural China, the pressures of poverty, ambition and state power, and the ways ordinary people bend or break under them. Several of his books have been banned or restricted in China, yet they have been widely translated and have won him an international readership and major literary honours. He matters as one of the boldest living Chinese writers, who treats painful modern history with imagination, humour and moral seriousness.