Mo Yan

"Mo Yan" – "don't speak" in Chinese – is his pen name. 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. It also relates to the subject matter of Mo Yan's writings, which reinterpret Chinese political and sexual history.

On 11 October 2012, the Swedish Academy announced that Mo Yan had received the Nobel Prize in Literature for his work that "with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary". Aged 57 at the time of the announcement, he was the 109th recipient of the award and the first ever resident of mainland China to receive it—Chinese-born Gao Xingjian, having been named the 2000 laureate. In his Award Ceremony Speech, Per Wästberg explained: "Mo Yan is a poet who tears down stereotypical propaganda posters, elevating the individual from an anonymous human mass. Using ridicule and sarcasm Mo Yan attacks history and its falsifications as well as deprivation and political hypocrisy."

Firstly, it won warm welcome from the Chinese government immediately after the announcement of the Nobel Prize. The People's Daily Online, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, published on 11 October 2012: "Congratulations to Mo Yan for winning the Nobel Prize in Literature! It is the first time for a writer of Chinese nationality to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Today is the day that Chinese writers have awaited for too long and that Chinese people have awaited for too long."

This is a complete list of Mo Yan's works published as a collection in 2012 in China (after Mo Yan received the Nobel Prize).

Perry Link, describing Mo Yan's fiction and politics in the New York Review of Books, asked, "Does this writer deserve the prize?" Link commented that Chinese writers, whether "inside the system" or not, "all must choose how they will relate to their country's authoritarian government." This "inevitably involves calculations, trade-offs, and the playing of cards in various ways." Link's main criticism was that Mo Yan "invoke(d) a kind of daft hilarity when treating 'sensitive' events" such as the Great Chinese Famine and the Cultural Revolution. Link believed that the regime approved it because "this mode of writing is useful not just because it diverts a square look at history but because of its function as a safety valve." As Link pointed out, to treat sensitive topics as jokes might be better than banning them outright. Link compared Mo to Liu Xiaobo, winner of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, who was jailed for dissidence, whose moral choices were "highly unusual." It would be wrong, Link concludes, "for spectators like you and me, who enjoy the comfort of distance, to demand that Mo Yan risk all and be another Liu Xiaobo. But it would be even more wrong to mistake the clear difference between the two."

Mo Yan, who himself reads foreign authors in translation, strongly advocates the reading of world literature. 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".

The Chinese writer Ma Jian deplored Mo Yan's lack of solidarity and commitment to other Chinese writers and intellectuals who were punished or detained in violation of their constitutionally protected freedom of expression. Several other Chinese dissidents such as Ye Du and Ai Weiwei also criticized him, as did 2009 Nobel Laureate Herta Müller who called the decision a "catastrophe". A specific criticism was that Mo hand-copied Mao Zedong's influential Yan'an Talks on Literature and Art in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the speech, which described the writer's responsibility to place politics before art. These "Talks"—which were the intellectual handcuffs of Chinese writers throughout the Mao era and were almost universally reviled by writers during the years between Mao's death in 1976 and the Tiananmen protest in 1989—were now again being held up for adulation. Mo Yan not only agreed but has gone further than others to explain that the "Talks," in their time, had "historical necessity" and "played a positive role." He has also attracted criticism for his supposed good relationship with the Chinese Communist Party in general.

He is best known to Western readers for his 1987 novel Red Sorghum Clan, of which the Red Sorghum and Sorghum Wine volumes were later adapted for the film Red Sorghum. In 2012, Mo was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his work as a writer "who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary".

In 1984, he received a literary award from the PLA Magazine, and the same year began attending the People's Liberation Army Arts College, where he first adopted the pen name of Mo Yan. He published his first novella, A Transparent Radish, in 1984, and released Red Sorghum in 1986, launching his career as a nationally recognized novelist. In 1991, he obtained a master's degree in Literature from Beijing Normal University.

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 novel was Falling Rain on a Spring Night, published in 1981.

Mo Yan's ability to convey traditionalist values inside of his mythical realism writing style in The Old Gun has allowed insight and view on the swift modernization of China. This short story of Mo Yan was an exemplary example for 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 1980's.

At the close of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, Mo enlisted in the People's Liberation Army (PLA), and began writing while he was still a soldier. During this post-Revolution era when he emerged as a writer, both the lyrical and epic works of Chinese literature, as well as translations of foreign authors such as William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, would make an impact on his works.

Guan Moye (simplified Chinese: 管谟业 ; traditional Chinese: 管謨業 ; pinyin: Guǎn Móyè ; born 17 February 1955), better known by the pen name Mo Yan (/m oʊ j ɛ n / , Chinese: 莫言 ; pinyin: Mò Yán ), is a Chinese novelist and short story writer. Donald Morrison of U.S. news magazine TIME referred to him as "one of the most famous, oft-banned and widely pirated of all Chinese writers", and Jim Leach called him the Chinese answer to Franz Kafka or Joseph Heller.

Mo Yan was born in 1955, in Gaomi County in Shandong to a family of farmers, in Dalan Township (which he fictionalised in his novels as "Northeast Township" of Gaomi County). Mo was 11 years old when the Cultural Revolution was launched, at which time he left school to work as a farmer. At the age of 18, he began work at a cotton factory. During this period, which coincided with a succession of political campaigns from the Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution, his access to literature was largely limited to novels in the socialist realist style under Mao Zedong, which centered largely on the themes of class struggle and conflict.

Anna Sun, an assistant professor of Sociology and Asian studies at Kenyon College, criticized Mo's writing as coarse, predictable, and lacking in aesthetic conviction. "Mo Yan's language is striking indeed," she writes, but it is striking because "it is diseased. The disease is caused by the conscious renunciation of China's cultural past at the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949." Charles Laughlin of the University of Virginia, however, accuses Sun of "piling up aesthetic objections to conceal ideological conflict," comparing her characterization of Mo to the official China Writers Association's characterization of Gao Xingjian as a mediocre writer when Gao won the Nobel Prize in 2000.

Mo Yan's Red Sorghum Clan 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 1949 Communist Revolution, and the Cultural Revolution, but in an unconventional way; for example from the point of view of the invading Japanese soldiers.