Mo Yan, winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature, is a pen name that means “Don’t Speak” in his native Chinese.
Those words were advice from his parents, who cautioned the young writer about who might be listening in the repressive China of his youth.It’s fair to say that his parents, though each must have possessed a store of creative genes to pass along, could never have imagined how many will be listening now. Mr. Yan was born in 1955: his tales
