Mo Yan

Guan Moye, better known by the pen name Mo Yan, is a Chinese novelist and short story writer. Donald Morrison of U.S. news magazine TIME referred to him as "one of the most famous, oft-banned and widely pirated of all Chinese writers", and Jim Leach called him the Chinese answer to Franz Kafka or Joseph Heller. 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".

17 February 1955

Born on the same birth day (17 February): Buddy DeFranco • Charles III, Duke of Bourbon • Drew Barry • Ivo Caprino • J. M. S. Careless • Josh Willingham • Mary Brian • Mary Carson Breckinridge • Oskar Seidlin • Paris Hilton • Patricia Routledge • Ronald Knox • Sherry Hawco • Tommy Edwards • Vasily Kudinov • Édouard Thilges

Born in the same month (February 1955): Eddie Johnson (basketball, born 1955) • Jimmy Pursey • Kelsey Grammer • Lisa See • Michael Pollan