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In this Chinese name, the family name is Guan.

Mo Yan (/moʊ jɛn/, Chinese: 莫言; pinyin: Mò Yán; lit. 'don’t speak'), born Guan Moye (simplified Chinese: 管谟业; traditional Chinese: 管謨業; pinyin: Guǎn Móyè; born 5 March 1955[1]), is a Chinese writer. He rose to international fame for his 1986 novel Red Sorghum, the first two parts of which were adapted into the Golden Bear-winning film Red Sorghum (1988).[2] In 2012, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his work which “with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary”.[3][4]

Name

“Mo Yan” (莫言), meaning “don’t speak” in Chinese, is the pen name he first adopted when contributing to Lian Chi (莲池), a literary magazine based in Baoding, during his years as a PLA soldier stationed there.[5] The sobriquet takes apart the traditional script form of the middle character of his birth name, Mo (謨), and also reflects the repressive political atmosphere he grew up with, when his parents would frequently caution him against speaking freely.[6][7]

In his early career, as remuneration for his published works was issued under his pen name, collecting payment at the post office each time required obtaining a certified letter bearing an official chop from his work unit; to spare himself the recurring inconvenience, he eventually adopted Mo Yan as his legal name.[6][7]

Biography

Mo Yan was born as Guan Moye in February 1955 into a peasant family in Ping’an Village, Gaomi Township, northeast of Shandong Province, China. His father received four years of education at a pre-revolutionary private school, with a solid grounding in the Chinese classics. His mother was illiterate. He is the youngest of four children with two older brothers and an older sister.[8] Though far from wealthy, his family was classified as upper-middle peasant during the class struggle campaigns, on account of a plot of land purchased with their life savings.[9]

Facing discrimination from teachers on account of his family’s status as a political pariah, and amid a largely dysfunctional curriculum disrupted by the Cultural Revolution, Mo Yan, at 11, withdrew in the fifth grade. His family set him to grazing animals on the grasslands, where, during long stretches of solitude, he taught himself Chinese characters from a Xinhua Dictionary, the only book he had.[10] In the autumn of 1973 he began working at a cotton processing factory, where he encountered a wider world, including a group of sent-down youth from Qingdao whose acquaintance with foreign literature and film left a strong impression on him. Throughout the Maoist era, when virtually all pre-revolutionary and foreign writers were banned save Lu Xun, his reading was narrow and ideologically constrained; yet he grew up immersed in a rich tradition of Chinese folklore and regional opera, which would prove fertile ground for his literary imagination.[11]

Military service had long been a coveted path for rural youths like Mo Yan, one of the few avenues of escape from the countryside, but it had been denied him on account of his family’s classification as upper-middle peasant. In early 1976, a friend from the cotton factory, whose father was a local military official, offered to help him enlist. After three years as a cotton worker, Mo Yan successfully enlisted at the end of 1976.[12] When the college entrance examination was restored during his years in the army, he prepared for four months, only to find that the local examination had been cancelled that year. Despite that, working as a librarian for the army, he voraciously read his way through the entire collection of over a thousand books in four years, and began to write.[13]

Mo Yan’s early literary model was Sun Li, who was admired for his graceful and lyrical prose style. As translations of foreign literature began circulating in China in the 1980s, Mo Yan, like many Chinese writers of his generation, came under the influence of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez; their magical realism offered him both an expressive idiom and a practical means of navigating censorship.[14]

In 1981, Mo Yan published his first works in a literary magazine Lian Chi based in Baoding, where he was stationed. In 1982, he was promoted and then transferred to the PLA’s Joint Staff Department in Beijing. In 1984, he was admitted to the People’s Liberation Army Academy of Art on the strength of his short story Folk Music, published in Lian Chi, an imitation of Carson McCullers‘s The Ballad of the Sad Café. He joined the inaugural cohort of a two-year programme, composed mostly of military cadres recommended for admission,[15] at the Department of Literature newly founded by the novelist Xu Huaizhong (徐怀中), who would become his mentor.

In 1984, Mo Yan published his first novella and claim to literary fame, A Transparent Radish. The story was originally titled A Golden Radish, but was renamed by Xu Huaizhong. Two years later, he published Red Sorghum (1986) at People’s Literature to great sensation in the literary circles, and attracted Zhang Yimou to visit him at the PLA Academy of Art to acquire the adaptation rights for what would become his directorial debut and win the Golden Bear at Berlinale.[16]

In 1987, Mo Yan’s novella Joy was published in the combined first and second issue of People’s Literature. It fell foul of the ongoing Anti-Bourgeois Liberalization Campaign. The journal’s editor-in-chief Liu Xinwu was suspended and placed under investigation, and the issue itself was recalled and destroyed.[17]

In April 1988, Mo Yan published The Garlic Ballads, inspired by a news incident in Cangshan, Shandong a year ago, when overproduction, collapsing prices, and predatory market administration fees drove farmers to riot outside the county government building. The novel’s sympathetic portrayal of an anti-government riot drew no immediate sanction upon publication, but in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square crackdown of June 1989 it was banned in mainland China and for a period could only be published in Hong Kong and Taiwan; it was unbanned four years later.[18] The American sinologist Howard Goldblatt, upon reading the novel, was so struck by it that he resolved to begin translating Mo Yan’s work, a decision that would prove instrumental in bringing Mo Yan to international audiences.[17]

In the autumn of 1988, Mo Yan enrolled in a postgraduate programme jointly run by the Chinese Writers’ Association and Beijing Normal University. During this period he wrote the satirical novel The Republic of Wine, which Goldblatt would later praise as the most imaginative, richly layered, and technically complex Chinese novel he had encountered. In 1991, Mo Yan graduated from Beijing Normal University with a master’s degree in literature.[17]

In 1999, Mo Yan, along with Wang Meng and Liu Xinwu, was a referee for an online literature contest hosted by NetEase which contributed to the early growth of internet literature in China.[19]: 23 

In 2012, Mo Yan became the first Chinese citizen to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.[20]: 184  Upon his receipt of the Nobel Prize later that year, some writers and artists criticized him for being too close to the authoritarian government of China.[21] A major target of criticism was that months before his prize winning, he was among a group of 100 artists who celebrated the 75th Anniversary of the Yan’an Talks in 2012 by hand copying the text of the talks.[22]: 58  Mo stated that he had no regrets for participating in the Yan’an Talks celebration: “I copied it because there is something valid in it; I broke from it because it could no longer satisfy the needs of my creative soul.”[22]: 58 

Mo Yan was also criticised by the author Salman Rushdie in 2012 after the announcement of the Nobel win, who called him a “patsy of the regime”, after he refused to sign a petition calling for the freedom of Liu Xiaobo,[23] a dissident involved in campaigns to end one party rule in China and the first Chinese citizen to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010.[9] Rushdie has not read any of Mo Yan’s works.[24]: 89  Mo Yan later suggested in a press conference in Stockholm, Sweden, that he would not join the appeal calling for the release of Liu Xiaobo from jail, although he hoped that Liu would be set free soon and had defended censorship as something equivalent to airport security checks.[25] According to Mo Yan, censorship should not stand in the way of truth, but defamation or rumors should be censored.[25]

In 2016, Mo Yan became the deputy chair of the Chinese Writers Association.[20]: 184 

Works

Mo Yan began his career as a writer in the reform and opening up period, publishing dozens of short stories and novels in Chinese. His first published short story was “Falling Rain on a Spring Night”, published in September 1981.[11]

In 1986, the five parts that formed his first novel, Red Sorghum (1987), were published serially. It is a non-chronological novel about the generations of a Shandong family between 1923 and 1976. The author deals with upheavals in Chinese history such as the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Chinese Communist Revolution, and the Cultural Revolution, but in an unconventional way; for example from the point of view of the invading Japanese soldiers.[26]

His second novel, The Garlic Ballads, is based on a true story of when the farmers of Gaomi Township rioted against a government that would not buy its crops. The Republic of Wine is a satire around gastronomy and alcohol, which uses cannibalism as a metaphor for Chinese self-destruction, following Lu Xun.[26] Big Breasts & Wide Hips deals with female bodies, from a grandmother whose breasts are shattered by Japanese bullets, to a festival where one of the child characters, Shangguan Jintong, blesses each woman of his town by stroking her breasts.[27] The book was controversial in China because some leftist critics objected to Big Breasts’ perceived negative portrayal of Communist soldiers.[27]

Mo Yan wrote Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out in 42 days.[28] He composed the more than 500,000 characters contained in the original manuscript on traditional Chinese paper using only ink and a writing brush. He prefers writing his novels by hand rather than by typing using a pinyin input method, because the latter method “limits your vocabulary”.[28] Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out is a meta-fiction about the story of a landlord who is reincarnated in the form of various animals during the Chinese land reform movement.[16] The landlord observes and satirizes Communist society, such as when he (as a donkey) forces two mules to share food with him, because “[in] the age of communism … mine is yours and yours is mine.”[29]

Pow!, Mo Yan’s first work to be translated into English after receiving the Nobel Prize, is about a young storytelling boy named Luo who was famous in his village for eating so much meat.[10] His village is so carnivorous it is an obsession that leads to corruption.[30] Pow! cemented his writing style as “hallucinatory realism”.[31] Another one of his works, Frog, Yan’s latest novel published, focuses on the cause and consequences of China’s one-child policy.[24]: 8  Set in a small rural Chinese town called Gaomi, the narrator Tadpole tells the story of his aunt Gugu, who once was a hero for delivering life into the world as a midwife, and now takes away life as an abortion provider.[32] Steven Moore from the Washington Post wrote, “another display of Mo Yan’s attractively daring approach to fiction. The Nobel committee chose wisely.”[33]

Style

Mo Yan’s works are epic historical novels characterized by hallucinatory realism and containing elements of black humour.[29] The Nobel Prize Committee which awarded him the 2012 Nobel Prize in literature described his hallucinatory realism as combining “folk tales, history, and the contemporary.”[20]: 184  His language is distinguished by his imaginative use of colour expressions.[34] A major theme in Mo Yan’s works is the constancy of human greed and corruption, despite the influence of ideology.[26] Using dazzling, complex, and often graphically violent images, he sets many of his stories near his hometown, Northeast Gaomi Township in Shandong province.

Mo Yan’s works are also predominantly social commentary, and he is strongly influenced by the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez[20]: 184–185  and the social realism of Lu Xun. Mo Yan says he realised that he could make “[my] family, [the] people I’m familiar with, the villagers” his characters after reading William Faulkner‘s The Sound and the Fury.[28] He satirizes the genre of socialist realism by placing workers and bureaucrats into absurd situations.[29] In terms of traditional Chinese literature, he is deeply inspired by the folklore-based classical epic novel Water Margin.[35] He cites Journey to the West and Dream of the Red Chamber as formative influences.[28] Mo Yan’s writing style has also been influenced by the Six Dynasties, chuanqi, notebook novels of the Ming and Qing dynasties and especially by folk oral literature. His creation combines all of these inspirations into one of the most distinctive voices in world literature.[12]

Mo Yan’s ability to convey traditionalist values inside of his mythical realism writing style in The Old Gun has allowed insight and view into the swift modernization of China. This short story by Mo Yan was an exemplary example of the Xungen movement Chinese literary movement and influenced many to turn back to traditional values. This movement portrayed the fear of loss of cultural identity due to the swift modernization of China in the 1980s.[36] Mo Yan reads foreign authors in translation and strongly advocates the reading of world literature.[37] At a speech to open the 2009 Frankfurt Book Fair, he discussed Goethe‘s idea of “world literature”, stating that “literature can overcome the barriers that separate countries and nations”.[38]

Mo Yan’s writing is characterised by the blurring of distinctions between “past and present, dead and living, as well as good and bad”.[27] Mo Yan appears in his novels as a semi-autobiographical character who retells and modifies the author’s other stories.[16] His female characters often fail to observe traditional gender roles, such as the mother of the Shangguan family in Big Breasts & Wide Hips, who, failing to bear her husband any sons, instead is an adulterer, becoming pregnant with girls by a Swedish missionary and a Japanese soldier, among others. Male power is also portrayed cynically in Big Breasts & Wide Hips, and there is only one male hero in the novel.[27]

As of 2012, Mo Yan was the most translated author of Chinese literature ever.[24]: 87  Mo Yan’s masterpieces have been translated into English by translator Howard Goldblatt. Goldblatt has effectively transmitted Chinese culture to target audiences by using a domestication technique augmented with foreignization.[34] Donald Morrison of TIME referred to him as “one of the most famous, oft-banned and widely pirated of all Chinese writers“,[39] and Jim Leach called him the Chinese answer to Franz Kafka or Joseph Heller.[28]

List of works

Below is a complete list of Mo Yan’s works.

Novels

Short story and novella collections

Plays

  • 《我们的荆轲》 Our Jing Ke (2011)
  • 《鳄鱼》Crocodile (2023)

Other works

  • 《会唱歌的墙》 The Wall Can Sing (60 essays, 1981–2011)
  • 《碎语文学》 Broken Philosophy (interviews, only available in Chinese)
  • 《用耳朵阅读》 Ears to Read (speeches, only available in Chinese)
  • 《盛典:诺奖之行》 Grand Ceremony (speeches and interviews) (2013)
  • 《莫言墨语》Mo Yan Mo Yu (essays and calligraphy) (2018)
  • 《三歌集》Collection of Three Ballads (poems and calligraphy) (2023)
  • 《放宽心，吃茶去》Release your Heart Sip the Moment (essays from WeChat official account, co-authored with Wang Zhen) (2025)

Awards and honours

Honorary doctorates

Adaptations

Several of Mo Yan’s works have been adapted for film:

See also

References

  1. ^ “Mo Yan”. Britannica. 1 March 2024. Retrieved 3 March 2024.
  2. ^ Inge, M. Thomas (1990). “Mo Yan and William Faulkner: Influences and Confluences”. Faulkner Journal. 6 (1): 15–24. ISSN 0884-2949. JSTOR 24907667.
  3. ^ “Mo Yan får Nobelpriset i litteratur 2012”. DN. 11 October 2012. Archived from the original on 13 October 2012. Retrieved 11 October 2012.
  4. ^ “The Nobel Prize in Literature 2012 Mo Yan”. Nobelprize.org. 11 October 2012. Retrieved 11 October 2012.
  5. ^ “莫言的”莲池”之恩”. qnzj.cyol.com. Retrieved 14 April 2026.
  6. ^ a b Ackbar. “王德威对话莫言_哔哩哔哩_bilibili”. www.bilibili.com (in Simplified Chinese). Retrieved 14 April 2026.
  7. ^ a b “HarvardX: ChinaX Book Club: Five Authors, Five Books, Five Views of China”. edX. Retrieved 14 April 2026.
  8. ^ “The Nobel Prize in Literature 2012”. NobelPrize.org. Retrieved 31 May 2022.
  9. ^ a b “Liu Xiaobo | Facts, Biography, & Nobel Prize | Britannica”. www.britannica.com. Retrieved 19 September 2024.
  10. ^ a b “Pow! by Mo Yan – review”. the Guardian. 18 January 2013. Retrieved 7 December 2021.
  11. ^ a b “The Nobel Prize in Literature 2012”. NobelPrize.org. Retrieved 10 May 2022.
  12. ^ a b Goldblatt, Howard (1 September 2013). “Mo Yan in Translation: One Voice among Many”. Chinese Literature Today. 3 (1–2): 6–9. doi:10.1080/21514399.2013.11833989. ISSN 2151-4399. S2CID 64496433.
  13. ^ “莫言-国家高端人才库”. www.chinaett.org.cn. Retrieved 12 April 2026.
  14. ^ SW12X – ChinaX (18 February 2015). “ChinaX: Introducing Mo Yan”. Archived from the original on 22 December 2021. Retrieved 7 November 2018 – via YouTube.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  15. ^ {{citation}}: Empty citation (help)
  16. ^ a b c Williford, James (January–February 2011). “Mo Yan 101”. Humanities. 32 (1): 10.
  17. ^ a b c “莫言-国家高端人才库”. www.chinaett.org.cn. Retrieved 12 April 2026.
  18. ^ “The Censorship of Mo Yan’s 天堂蒜薹之歌: (The Garlic Ballads) (The Garlic Ballads) from Mo Yan in Context: Nobel Laureate and Global Storyteller on JSTOR”. www.jstor.org. Retrieved 12 April 2026.
  19. ^ Han, Rongbin (2026). Make China Great Again: Online Alt-History Fiction and Popular Authoritarianism. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-22054-5.
  20. ^ a b c d e f Wang, David Der-wei (2016). “Red Legacies in Fiction”. In Li, Jie; Zhang, Enhua (eds.). Red Legacies in China: Cultural Afterlives of the Communist Revolution. Harvard Contemporary China Series. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Asia Center. ISBN 978-0-674-73718-1.
  21. ^ York, Josh Chin and Paul Mozur in Beijing and Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg in New. “Chinese Writer Wins Literature Nobel”. WSJ. Retrieved 21 March 2024.
  22. ^ a b c Yi, Guolin (2024). “From “Seven Speak-Nots” to “Media Surnamed Party”: Media in China from 2012 to 2022″. In Fang, Qiang; Li, Xiaobing (eds.). China under Xi Jinping: A New Assessment. Leiden University Press. ISBN 9789087284411.
  23. ^ Daley, David (7 December 2012). “Rushdie: Mo Yan is a “patsy of the regime”“. Salon. Retrieved 19 September 2024.
  24. ^ a b c Hockx, Michel (2026). Literature and Censorship in Modern China. New York, NY: Routledge. ISBN 9781032775838.
  25. ^ a b “Censorship is a must, says China’s Nobel winner”. The Guardian. Associated Press. 7 December 2012. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 19 September 2024.
  26. ^ a b c Inge, M. Thomas (June 2000). “Mo Yan Through Western Eyes”. World Literature Today. 74 (3): 501–507. doi:10.2307/40155816. JSTOR 40155816.
  27. ^ a b c d Chan, Shelley W. (Summer 2000). “From Fatherland to Motherland: On Mo Yan’s ‘Red Sorghum’ and ‘Big Breasts and Full Hips’“. World Literature Today. 74 (3): 495–501. doi:10.2307/40155815. JSTOR 40155815.
  28. ^ a b c d e Leach, Jim (January–February 2011). “The Real Mo Yan”. Humanities. 32 (1): 11–13.
  29. ^ a b c Huang, Alexander (July–August 2009). “Mo Yan as Humorist”. World Literature Today. 83 (4): 32–35. doi:10.1353/wlt.2009.0315. S2CID 161013759.
  30. ^ Garner, Dwight (1 January 2013). “A Meaty Tale, Carnivorous and Twisted”. The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 7 December 2021.
  31. ^ “The Nobel Prize in Literature 2012”. NobelPrize.org. Retrieved 7 December 2021.
  32. ^ Hogensen, Brooke Ann (1 November 2015). “Mo Yan, Frog: A Novel”. Transnational Literature. 8 (1). ISSN 1836-4845.
  33. ^ Moore, Steven (23 March 2015). “Book review: ‘Frog,’ by Mo Yan”. Washington Post. Retrieved 6 December 2021.
  34. ^ a b Ding, Rongrong; Wang, Lixun (4 May 2017). “Mo Yan’s style in using colour expressions and Goldblatt’s translation strategies: a corpus-based study”. Asia Pacific Translation and Intercultural Studies. 4 (2): 117–131. doi:10.1080/23306343.2017.1331389. ISSN 2330-6343.
  35. ^ Howard Yuen Fung Choy, Remapping the Past: Fictions of History in Deng’s China, 1979 -1997. Leiden: BRILL, 2008. pp. 51–53. ISBN 9004167048.
  36. ^ W. W. Norton, The Old Gun, 1985. Mo Yan: The Norton Anthology, 2018. pp. 1101-1110.ISBN 9780393602869.
  37. ^ “World Literature and China in a Global Age”. Chinese Literature Today. 1 (1): 101–103. July 2010.
  38. ^ Yan, Mo; Yao, Benbiao (July 2010). “A Writer Has a Nationality, but Literature Has No Boundary”. Chinese Literature Today. 1 (1): 22–24. doi:10.1080/21514399.2010.11833905. S2CID 194781082.
  39. ^ Morrison, Donald (14 February 2005). “Holding Up Half The Sky”. Time. Archived from the original on 11 March 2007. Retrieved 14 February 2005.
  40. ^ The Woman with Flowers – WorldCat
  41. ^ “Mo Yan releases 1st body of new works since Nobel win”. China Daily. 31 July 2020. Retrieved 26 September 2020.
  42. ^ “I.B.3 –CITY COLLEGE – HONORARY DEGREES TO BE AWARDED AT THE COLLEGE’S ANNUAL COMMENCEMENT CEREMONY ON MAY 31, 2013” (PDF). Retrieved 7 November 2018.
  43. ^ “佛光大學頒授莫言榮譽文學博士學位”. www.cna.com.tw. Archived from the original on 8 January 2022. Retrieved 8 January 2022.
  44. ^ “Hanban-News”. english.hanban.org. Retrieved 7 November 2018.
  45. ^ Kong, The Open University of Hong. “The Open University of Hong Kong: Openlink Vol 23 Issue 4 (Dec 2014)”. www.ouhk.edu.hk. Retrieved 7 November 2018.
  46. ^ “News Express: Nobel laureate Mo Yan speaks on Chinese literature at UM”. um2.umac.mo. Retrieved 7 November 2018.
  47. ^ “Honorary Doctorates and Honorary University Fellows – HKBU”. www.hkbu.edu.hk. Retrieved 7 November 2018.

Further reading