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.
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