Don't say that

Mo Yan, whose pen name literally means "don't say" or "don't speak," is one of the most celebrated contemporary Chinese writers. Born Guan Moye in 1955 in Gaomi, Shandong Province, he grew up in a rural farming family and drew deeply upon this background for his fiction. After joining the People's Liberation Army, he studied literature and began publishing in the early 1980s. In 2012, he became the first Chinese national to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, praised by the Swedish Academy for his "hallucinatory realism [that] merges folk tales, history and the contemporary."

His novels are known for sweeping narratives, earthy humor, magical realism, and vivid portrayals of rural China, especially his fictionalized hometown of "Northeast Gaomi Township." His major works include Red Sorghum (1986), an epic family saga of the Anti-Japanese War later adapted into Zhang Yimou's famous film; The Garlic Ballads (1988); The Republic of Wine (1993); Big Breasts and Wide Hips (1996), a multigenerational chronicle of twentieth-century China; Sandalwood Death (2001); Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (2006); and Frog (2009), which examines China's one-child policy. Through prolific output and a distinctive voice, Mo Yan has become a defining figure of modern Chinese literature.