1. Guan Moye, better known by the pen name Mo Yan, is a Chinese novelist and short story writer.
27 Facts About Mo Yan
1. 2.
Mo Yan is best known to Western readers for his 1986 novel Red Sorghum, the first two parts of which were adapted into the Golden Bear-winning film Red Sorghum.
3.
Mo Yan was born in February 1955 into a peasant family in Ping'an Village, Gaomi Township, northeast of Shandong Province, the People's Republic of China.
4.
Mo Yan is the youngest of four children with two older brothers and an older sister.
5.
Mo Yan's family was of an upper-middle peasant class background.
6.
Mo Yan published his first novella, A Transparent Radish, in 1984, and released Red Sorghum in 1986, launching his career as a nationally recognized novelist.
7.
Mo Yan has explained on occasion that the name comes from a warning from his father and mother not to speak his mind while outside, because of China's revolutionary political situation from the 1950s, when he grew up.
8.
Mo Yan began his career as a writer in the reform and opening up period, publishing dozens of short stories and novels in Chinese.
9.
Mo Yan's first published short story was "Falling Rain on a Spring Night", published in September 1981.
10.
Extremely prolific, Mo Yan wrote Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out in only 42 days.
11.
Mo Yan composed the more than 500,000 characters contained in the original manuscript on traditional Chinese paper using only ink and a writing brush.
12.
Mo Yan prefers writing his novels by hand rather than by typing using a pinyin input method, because the latter method "limits your vocabulary".
13.
Mo Yan's village is so carnivorous it is an obsession that leads to corruption.
14.
Mo Yan's works are epic historical novels characterized by hallucinatory realism and containing elements of black humour.
15.
Mo Yan's language is distinguished by his imaginative use of colour expressions.
16.
Mo Yan's works are predominantly social commentary, and he is strongly influenced by the social realism of Lu Xun and the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
17.
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.
18.
Mo Yan cites Journey to the West and Dream of the Red Chamber as formative influences.
19.
Mo Yan's writing style has been influenced by the Six Dynasties, chuanqi, notebook novels of the Ming and Qing dynasties and especially by folk oral literature.
20.
Mo Yan's creation combines all of these inspirations into one of the most distinctive voices in world literature.
21.
Mo Yan reads foreign authors in translation and strongly advocates the reading of world literature.
22.
Mo Yan's writing is characterised by the blurring of distinctions between "past and present, dead and living, as well as good and bad".
23.
Mo Yan appears in his novels as a semi-autobiographical character who retells and modifies the author's other stories.
24.
Mo Yan's masterpieces have been translated into English by translator Howard Goldblatt.
25.
Mo Yan 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.
26.
Mo Yan has written 11 novels, and several novellas and short story collections.
27.
Several of Mo Yan's works have been adapted for film:.