Chinese · b. 1955
Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012 for his "hallucinatory realism" that "merges folk tales, history and the contemporary." The Chinese author's "Red Sorghum" (1987) follows a family through Japanese occupation and revolution; "Big Breasts and Wide Hips" (1995) tracks a mother and her many children across twentieth-century China. "Frog" (2009) examines the one-child policy. Mo Yan's pen name means "don't speak"—an ironic alias for one of his country's most prolific voices.