Mo Yan

Born Guan Moye in rural Gaomi, Shandong, he left school at eleven as the Cultural Revolution emptied the classrooms, working the fields through famine years before joining the People's Liberation Army, where he began writing. He took the pen name Mo Yan ('don't speak') as a private reminder of what plain speech had cost people around him under Mao.

Red Sorghum, narrated by a grandson mythologizing his outlaw grandparents' resistance to Japanese occupation, fused Faulkner's structure and García Márquez's excess onto Shandong soil and became Zhang Yimou's directorial debut on film. Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out later reincarnated an executed landlord as donkey, ox, pig, and dog to narrate five decades of land reform and revolution.

In 2012 he became the first Nobel laureate in literature still resident in mainland China, a choice that drew criticism from dissident writers over his ties to the Communist establishment even as his novels kept smuggling harsh history into folk-epic form.