[5] In 2012, Mo was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his work as a writer "who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary".

[6][7] Mo Yan was born in February 1955 into a peasant family in Ping'an Village, Gaomi Township, northeast of Shandong Province, the People's Republic of China.

[12] In 1984, he received a literary award from the PLA Magazine, and the same year began attending the People's Liberation Army Arts College, where he first adopted the pen name of Mo Yan.

[14] Mo Yan has explained on occasion that the name comes from a warning from his father and mother not to speak his mind while outside, because of China's revolutionary political situation from the 1950s, when he grew up.

[16] Mo Yan began his career as a writer in the reform and opening up period, publishing dozens of short stories and novels in Chinese.

[18] His second novel, The Garlic Ballads, is based on a true story of when the farmers of Gaomi Township rioted against a government that would not buy its crops.

[19] The book was controversial in China because some leftist critics objected to Big Breasts' perceived negative portrayal of Communist soldiers.

[3] Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out is a meta-fiction about the story of a landlord who is reincarnated in the form of various animals during the Chinese land reform movement.

"[15] Pow!, Mo Yan's first work to be translated into English after receiving the Nobel Prize, is about a young storytelling boy named Luo who was famous in his village for eating so much meat.

The Nobel committee chose wisely.”[24] Mo Yan's works are epic historical novels characterized by hallucinatory realism and containing elements of black humour.

[18] Using dazzling, complex, and often graphically violent images, he sets many of his stories near his hometown, Northeast Gaomi Township in Shandong province.

Mo Yan says he realised that he could make "[my] family, [the] people I'm familiar with, the villagers" his characters after reading William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury.

[26] Mo Yan's ability to convey traditionalist values inside of his mythical realism writing style in The Old Gun has allowed insight and view into the swift modernization of China.

[30]: 58 Mo was also criticised by the author Salman Rushdie in 2012 after the announcement of the Nobel win, who called him a "patsy of the regime", after he refused to sign a petition calling for the freedom of Liu Xiaobo,[32] a dissident involved in campaigns to end one party rule in China and the first Chinese citizen to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010.