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Mo Yan is a contemporary writer who blends folk tales, history and the contemporary in his works. He is known for his novels Red Sorghum, The Republic of Wine and Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012.
Mo Yan (born March 5, 1955, Gaomi, Shandong province, China) is a Chinese novelist and short-story writer renowned for his imaginative and humanistic fiction, which became popular in the 1980s. Mo was awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Hong Gaoliang Jiazu 红高粱家族 “Red Sorghum”
- Tangxiang Xing 檀香刑 “Sandalwood Death”
- Shengsi Pilao 生死疲劳 “Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out”
- WA 蛙 “Frog”
- Tiantang Suantai Zhi GE 天堂蒜薹之歌 “The Garlic Ballads”
- Jiuguo 酒国 “The Republic of Wine”
- Yang Mao Zhuanyehu 养猫专业户 “The Man Who Raised Cats and Other Stories”
- Fengru Feitun 丰乳肥臀 “Big Breasts & Wide Hips”
- Other Works
- GeneratedCaptionsTabForHeroSec
Red Sorghum, literally “The Red Sorghum Clan”, is one of the novels that’s most distinctive of Mo Yan, originally published in five parts between 1985 and 1986, to then be published in a single text in 1988. With realistic writing that also recalls the magical and bizarre, the book tells the story of a family from the Gaomi district over the course...
Sandalwood Death is my favorite of Mo Yan’s writings. A novel published in 2001, many consider it to be a typical story: it’s set in China of the 1900’s at the time of the Boxer Rebellion. The Boxers were a rebellion raised in China by a large number of popular Chinese organizations and a good number of schools for martial arts against the foreign ...
Shengsi pilao, literally “The Trouble of Living and Dying”, translated into various languages as “The Six Reincarnations of Ximen Nao”, is a novel that was published in 2006. Just like The Torture of the Wooden Sandal, this too is a historical novel that recounts China’s affairs in the second half of the Twentieth Century through the eyes of a land...
Frog is a novel published in 2009; the title is a phonetic play on words between two Chinese words that are distinguished only by a different tone: wa 蛙 “frog” and wa 娃 “children”. This novel intends to denounce the one child policy, especially in the countryside: many people, in order to avoid the negative consequences for not respecting the one c...
This novel, published in 1988 and set the year before, centers around Tiantang 天堂 (literally “Paradise”), an imaginary place in China where a group of peasants are obligated by the Chinese Communist Party to cultivate garlic due to a completely failing agricultural plan that collapses the sale of garlic, leaving the peasants high and dry. Reduced t...
The Republic of Wine is a satirical novel published in 1993 about the relationship the Chinese have with food and alcohol, as well as the corruption of government officials and excesses. The novel follows two narrative threads: one part is sort of like detective fiction; in the other we have a correspondence of letters between Mo Yan in person and ...
The stories in this collection have a close relationship, both linguistically and thematically to Red Sorghum. This is why the setting of many of these stories are sorghum fields that give birth to wonders and a mysterious world of swarms of divine ducks, white colors, grass fish that came out of who knows where that dart among the green stems of s...
In 1995 Mo Yan published a novel that dealt with the story of a family called “Big Breasts & Wide Hips”. In this novel which is together a hymn to his mother, land and people, Mo Yan vividly describes in a neorealist style life in Shandong during the Thirties. The story gravitates around a woman and her eight daughters and one son, the Shangguan 上官...
The following are other titles of works written by Mo Yan, and I’ll leave it up to you to do the pleasant task of reading them and discovering what they are about: 十三步 (shi san bu) “Thirteen Steps”; 食草家族 (shi cao jiazu) “The Herbivorous Family”; 红树林 (hong shulin) “Red Forest”; 四十一炮 (si shi yi pao) “Pow!”; 怀抱鲜花的女人 (huaibao xianhua de nv ren) “The Wo...
Learn about Mo Yan, the Chinese writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2012 for his realistic and magical stories. Discover his life, his influences, his most important novels and his adaptations to film.
Facts. © The Nobel Foundation. Photo: U. Montan. Mo Yan. The Nobel Prize in Literature 2012. Born: 25 March 1956, Gaomi, China. Residence at the time of the award: China. Prize motivation: “who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary” Language: Chinese. Prize share: 1/1. Life.
- Red Sorghum Clan《红高粱家族》 (1993) Red Sorghum is one of Mo’s early novels and remains one of his best-known works. Mo Yan wrote the three generations of a rural family in Shandong Province between 1923 and 1976.
- 《丰乳肥臀》 Big Breasts & Wide Hips (2004) Big Breasts and Wide Hips tells the story of how a mom endured every bit of hardship to bring up and save the lives of her children and grandchildren through the 20th century.
- The Republic of Wine: A Novel《酒国》 (2000) The Republic of Wine: A Novel is a satirical novel. It explores the relationship between Chinese people and food and drink, and comments on government corruption and excesses.
- Sandalwood Death《檀香刑》(2013) Sandalwood Death is set during the Boxer Rebellion (1898-1901). The novel centers on the relationship between a woman, Sun Meiniang, and three paternal figures in her life, including her biological father, Sun Bing.
Mo Yan – The Story of My Life. I was born on the 25 of March 1956* into a peasant family in the Ping’an Village Production Brigade of the Heya People’s Commune, Northeast Gaomi Township, Shandong Province, the People’s Republic of China. The youngest of four children, I have two older brothers and a sister. Since my father and his ...
Aug 14, 2021 · Nine years after receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature, Mo Yan, 66, shows no sign of letting up in his pursuit of crafting great stories, remaining a passionate storyteller as energetic as he was three decades ago.
