Mo Yan

Mo Yan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012, with the Swedish Academy citing his fictional world that "with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary." Born Guan Moye in 1955 in Gaomi, Shandong Province — a region that recurs throughout his fiction as a kind of mythological homeland — he grew up in poverty during the Cultural Revolution and began writing in the 1980s as China opened to the world.

His breakthrough internationally came with Red Sorghum (1987, translated by Howard Goldblatt), a violent, exuberant, and morally complex account of his grandmother's generation during the Japanese occupation, later filmed by Zhang Yimou. His subsequent novels — The Garlic Ballads, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, The Republic of Wine, Frog — are equally energetic and equally willing to engage with the darkest corners of Chinese history. He remains one of the most important writers in the world, though his failure to speak out for Liu Xiaobo and other imprisoned Chinese writers following his Nobel award has been a source of significant controversy.