Mo Yan: a dark satirist who tells the 'big stories of China'
Mo Yan rose from the countryside to write epic works on the country's tumultuous 20th century
Mo Yan has come far from Gaomi, where he was born to a farming family in the early days of communist rule, but his writing has never left.
The rural county in eastern Shandong province, with its rich, earthy landscape, has provided the setting for several of his accomplished works, not least his 1987 breakthrough - a tale of the brutal violence that plagued the countryside in the 1920s and 1930s.
Born Guan Moye, he left school aged 12 to work on a farm during the Cultural Revolution. A stint in a factory followed before he joined the People's Liberation Army in 1976. It was there the future Nobel Prize laureate began writing and studying literature.
Early on, he adopted the pen name Mo Yan - "don't speak" - in Chinese. The author often got in trouble as a chatty child and figured it was better to express himself through writing.
He's a great writer... [and] very canny about what can and can't be written
Crafting a style that has been compared to the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mo Yan went on to author works, such as , and .
