莫言英文介绍

Mo Yan 莫言

Born Guan Moye, the author writes under the pen name Mo Yan, which means "don't speak" in Chinese.He began writing while a soldier in the People's Liberation Army and received international fame in 1987 with Red Sorghum: A Novel of China, which was made into a film.

Mo Yan (Chinese: 莫言; pinyin: Mò Yán) (born February 17, 1955) is a Chinese author, described as "one of the most famous, oft-banned and widely pirated of all Chinese writers". He is known in the West for two of his novels which were the basis of the film Red Sorghum. He has been referred to as the Chinese answer to Franz Kafka or Joseph Heller.

Mo Yan was born in the Shandong province to a family of farmers. He left school during the Cultural Revolution to work in a factory that produced oil. He joined the People's Liberation Army at age twenty, and began writing while he was still a soldier, in 1981. Three years later, he was given a teaching position at the Department of Literature in the Army's Cultural Academy.

Writing style

Mo Yan's works are predominantly social commentary, and he is strongly influenced by the political critique of Lu Xun and the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Using dazzling, complex, and often graphically violent images, Mo Yan draws readers into the disturbing yet

beautiful, kaleidoscopic universes of his stories. He sets many of his stories near his hometown, Northeast Gaomi Township in Shandong province.

Extremely prolific, Mo Yan wrote his latest novel, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out in only 43 days. He composed the more than 500,000 characters contained in the original manuscript on traditional Chinese paper using only ink and a writing brush.