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).

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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.