Yan Lianke

Yan Lianke is one of China's most important and most censored contemporary novelists — a writer of extraordinary moral courage whose fiction confronts the catastrophes of Chinese history with a grotesque, satirical energy that the state has found consistently intolerable. Born in rural Henan Province in 1958, he grew up in one of the regions worst affected by the Great Leap Forward famines, and the memory of that catastrophe saturates his work.

His novel Serve the People! (2005) — a black comedy set during the Cultural Revolution — was banned within months of publication. Dream of Ding Village (2006) drew on the real AIDS crisis in Henan caused by commercial blood-selling programmes. Lenin's Kisses is a surrealist satire of rural exploitation. In the West he has been repeatedly shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize and is consistently mentioned as a potential Nobel laureate. He teaches in Hong Kong, where he has marginally more freedom than on the mainland.