Reading
Mo Yan (Beijing/China)
In Chinese and English with translation.
Host: Sabine Peschel (sinologist and editor, Deutsche Welle, Bonn)
Ever since Zhang Yimou made his prize-winning film of Mo Yan’s novel Red Sorghum at a the very latest, Mo Yan has been considered one of the most important and successful authors of contemporary Chinese literature - and not only in China, but across the globe too.
Guan Moye, who writes under the pseudonym of Mo Ya - which means ‘no language’ - was born into a peasant family in Gaomi, in the province of Shandong, in 1956. At the age of twenty, he joined the army as a soldier and began to write literature. In the early 1980s, he caught people’s attention with his first publications. His first published work was the novel A transparent Radish. In 1984, he began teaching at the literature department of the military academy for culture. In 1992, his novel The Republic of Wine was published, a brilliant farce and political allegory that took a bold, critical look at modern China and its social reality. Mo Yan will be reading from his novel Shengsi Pilao (the exhaustion of the life cycle), whose protagonist experiences Chinese history in various manifestations, e.g. as a dog, as a pig … and contemporary reality as a human being.
Publications include:
- Red Sorghum. Novel (Penguin, 1994)
- The Republic of Wine. Novel (Arcade Publishing 2001)
- The Garlic Ballads. (Vitzing, 1995)
