| Chapter : | Introduction: Hunger and Loneliness: Mo Yan’s Muses in Becoming a Writer |
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translated into English; his works have also been translated into many other languages, including French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. One of his novels, The Red Sorghum Family, was adapted for film by the internationally acclaimed director Zhang Yimou (
), and the film won the Golden Bear Award at the 1988 Berlin International Film Festival; this was the first major international prize awarded to a post-Mao Chinese film. Moreover, the novel was selected by the magazine World Literature Today as one of the “Top 40” of its first seventy-five years of publication and as the best of the year 1987. Zhang Yimou also adapted Mo Yan’s “Shifu yuelaiyue youmo” (
) [Shifu, you’ll do anything for a laugh] for the silver screen as a film entitled Xingfu shiguang (
) [Happy times], which won its director the Fipresci Prize and the Silver Spike at the Valladolid International Film Festival in 2000. In addition, the movie Nuan (
), adapted by director Huo Jianqi (
) from Mo Yan’s novella “Baigou qiuqianjia” (
) [White dog and the swings], received the Tokyo Grand Prix–the Governor of Tokyo Award, at the 16th Tokyo International Film Festival in 2003. Mo Yan himself has frequently won various prestigious awards, including the inaugural Newman Prize for Chinese Literature in 2009, the first major American award for Chinese literature. Emerging in the mid-1980s as a young experimental writer, Mo Yan has since become a veteran and one of the most celebrated writers of Chinese literature today—recognized for his diligence and artistic achievements. Considered by many to be the most successful fiction writer in China, his talent, rich with creative enthusiasm, continues to flourish. Whereas writers of one generation after another have gradually stopped writing or have moved on to other professions, Mo Yan has continued his writing career, surprising readers and critics with a new masterpiece every two to three years.
Categorized by critics as a root seeker, a modernist, an expressionist, and a writer of magical realism, Mo Yan is a multifaceted novelist whose works cannot be easily pigeonholed. He is far more complex than any one of the above-mentioned labels would suggest, and the discussion of his importance can be extended to many dimensions—for instance,