The author's name means don't talk: Who is Mo Yan?

MO YAN was born in China in 1955. He left school at the age of eleven during the Cultural Revolution and started working as a farmer. Then he worked in a cotton factory and started writing. His early works were more in the social realist style specific to the Mao period. When the Cultural Revolution movement ended in 1976, Mo Yan joined the People's Liberation Army and continued to write while serving in the army.

The author, whose real name is Gu n Móyè, started using the name Mo Yan, which means "don't talk" in Chinese, in 1984. Described by Time magazine as "one of China's most famous, most frequently banned and most pirated writers", Mo Yan's major novels include Red Millet Fields, Big Breasts and Wide Hips, "Sandalwood Torment", The Weary of Life and Death, “Change”, “Forty-One Mortars”, “Garlic Ballad”, “Republic of Alcohol”. On the other hand, he has a story collection called "The Master Gets Funnier as He Goes" and a storybook called "Explosion".

Guan Moye (born 17 February 1955), better known by the pen name Mo Yan, is a Chinese novelist and short story writer. Donald Morrison of U.S. news magazine TIME referred to him as "one of the most famous, oft-banned and widely pirated of all Chinese writers", and Jim Leach called him the Chinese answer to Franz Kafka or Joseph Heller. In 2012, Mo was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his work as a writer "who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary".

When Mo Yan received the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature, he became the first Chinese Nobel laureate who was born in China and lived in China.

Mo Yan's life story

Mo Yan is known in the Western world for his novel, which was the subject of the movie "Red Millet Fields". The author, considered China's Kafka, was awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature.

In Red Millet Fields, where the stories of three generations of the Shandong family living in a Chinese village that resisted Japanese attacks between 1923 and 1976 are told, the narrator is Mo Yan, also a member of the family.

“Grandson” Mo Yan writes in the style of a storyteller what he heard from his grandmother. This form of narrative brings him closer to the magical realism movement. From the first page of the novel, it makes the reader feel like they are reading the Marquez of the Far East.

It is inevitable that a writer who tells local stories from the perspective of his "grandmother" will serve magical realism. Although the author says that he met Marquez after he started writing Red Millet Fields, he does not hesitate to admit that he was influenced by the West.

Having traces of this movement had a great impact on his receiving the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature. The literature committee announced that this award was given to Mo Yan for "blending folkloric tales with historical facts and modern-day stories."

Red Millet Fields, in which tragedy and humor, irony, and sadness are synthesized with a sometimes exaggerated and enthusiastic narrative, also carries an epic atmosphere, but the fact that the events are not told in chronological order and the fiction suffers temporal and spatial interruptions makes the novel different from familiar epics.

The relationship of the story, woven with heroism, cruelty, and betrayal, with nature is undeniable.

Mo Yan's greatest achievement is his ability to describe all events, good and bad, in detail. His mastery in making people experience the most tragic, cruel, and brutal events moment by moment shows what kind of an atmosphere of imagination he creates against the brutality of war.

By incorporating war and historical events into literature, Mo Yan fills a huge gap in conveying the legacy of China's great resistance. He explains how he did this with the following words:

“Although we did not hear the explosions of cannons and rifles, we did hear the explosions of fireworks; Although we did not see anyone die, we saw a pig being slaughtered, I even slaughtered a chicken with my own hands; Even though I didn't fight the Japanese with a bayonet in my hand, I saw what it was like in movies. What a novelist does is not copy history verbatim; this is the responsibility of historians. While describing war and this phenomenon, novelists express how it destroys the human spirit and how people change during the war. "What I mean is that someone who has never experienced a war can write about the real war by going through these paths."

In addition to the brutality of war, Mo Yan also includes the hidden aspects of human nature in his narrative. Sexuality and hunger come first among these. The passion and lust that arise between his grandmother and grandfather from the first moment they meet turn into anger and hatred with the intervention of the second grandmother. Again, packs of starving dogs haunt the corpses of those who died during the resistance and the struggle of the villagers to protect their corpses from the dogs fuels the feeling of hunger in people.

Everything lives with its opposite in this novel, where the basic aspects of the human soul such as love, hatred, jealousy, heroism, anger, deceit, cowardice, and weakness are described in ebb and flow. Most of Mo Yan's novels, which convey the facts of daily life such as sexuality, drunkenness, funerals, hunger, and violence with all their clarity and unique black humor, end in tragedy, but there is always hope and honor in them.