Biography
Mo Yan was born in 1955, in Gaomi County in Shandong province to a family of farmers, in Dalan Township (which he fictionalised in his novels as "Northeast Township" of Gaomi County). He left school during the Cultural Revolution to work in a factory that produced petroleum. After the Cultural Revolution he joined the People's Liberation Army (PLA), 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 PLA Academy of Art and Literature, where he published his first novella, A Transparent Radish (1984). In 1991, he obtained a master's degree in Literature from Beijing Normal University.
Read more about this topic: Mo Yan
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“The best part of a writer’s biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)