Mo Yan, whose pen name means “Don’t Speak”, was born in 1955 into a rural family in northern China. He credits William Faulkner and Gabriel Garcia Marquez as early writing influences.

His breakthrough came with the novel Red Sorghum, published in 1987. Set in a small village like much of his fiction, Red Sorghum is a tale of love and struggles among three generations of a rural Chinese family set against the backdrop of war.

In our second novel, Frog, published in 2008, Mo Yan traces the turbulent history of China in the twentieth century through the life of one indomitable woman, the narrator’s aunt Gugu, from her birth in 1937 to her retirement in the early 21st century. Gugu’s story follows her career as a star obstetrician in her home village to her troubled role during China’s controversial One Child Policy.

In 2012, Mo Yan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy, praised Mo's writing style as "hallucinatory realism," saying it "merges folk tales, history and the contemporary." The subversive humor in his work has also been compared to Kafka’s.

In his Nobel lecture, Mo Yan stated, “I know that nebulous terrain exists in the hearts and minds of every person, terrain that cannot be adequately characterized in simple terms of right and wrong or good and bad, and this vast territory is where a writer gives free rein to his talent. So long as the work correctly and vividly describes this nebulous, massively contradictory terrain, it will inevitably transcend politics and be endowed with literary excellence.

Mo Yan’s work has been hailed by John Updike in The New Yorker for his unique mix of “brutal incident, magic realism, natural description, and far-flung metaphor.”

Amy Tan has said that “Mo Yan’s voice will find its way into the heart of the American reader, just as Kundera and García Márquez have.”

There will be much food for thought as we explore new terrain in these two staggering novels.

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