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. 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. 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. 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. 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, at the Department of Literature newly founded by the novelist Xu Huaizhong (), 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 Zhang's directorial debut and win the
Golden Bear at
Berlinale. In April 1988, Mo Yan published
The Garlic Ballads, inspired by an 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. 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. In 2012, Mo Yan became the first Chinese citizen to receive the
Nobel Prize in Literature. 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. 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. Rushdie has not read any of Mo Yan's works. According to Mo Yan, censorship should not stand in the way of truth, but defamation or rumors should be censored. ==Works==