Yan Lianke

Yan Lianke grew up poor in rural Henan and joined the People's Liberation Army partly to escape it, spending decades in uniform writing propaganda and reportage before a novel critical of military life got him effectively discharged from that career. He turned the same directness on Chinese Communist Party language and campaigns.

Serve the People! sent a soldier's wife and her lover into a Cultural Revolution-era affair fueled by the smashing of Mao portraits, and was banned almost immediately; Dream of Ding Village, based on a real blood-selling scandal that spread AIDS through rural villages, and The Four Books, on the Great Leap Forward's famine and re-education camps, met the same fate. Nearly all his major novels remain officially unpublishable in mainland China even as he continues living and writing there.

He has won the Franz Kafka Prize and been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize multiple times, making him one of the most internationally honored writers his own country refuses to print.