On December 10, Chinese writer Mo Yan will be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature at a ceremony in Stockholm. Born into a farming family in 1955, Guan Moye was a talkative child, and admonitions by his mother to speak less, or risk getting into political trouble, resulted in his pen name, Mo Yan, meaning "Don't Speak." His novels include elements of magical realism and have been compared to the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.