One of the most translated Chinese authors in contemporary China, he is the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, which he won in 2012 for his body of work that "with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary".

　　He is best known for his novelRed Sorghum, which was adapted into the Golden Bear-winning film of the same title in 1988. He is also active on several Chinese social media platforms and his WeChat account features a comic cartoon portrait and a simple sentence: "I want to chat with young people."

　　Mo Yan's latest book,Ren Na(Being Human), is a collection of 81 tightly crafted short stories. It's been six years since the 71-year-old writer published his last book.[Photo provided to China Daily]

　　The book launch forRen Nafeatured Mo Yan in dialogue with Song Fangjin, a screenwriter, TV director and novelist. Song started the session by asking about his experience working with director Zhang Yimou on the movie adaptation of his novelRed Sorghum.

　　"When the movie was being shot in Gaomi (Mo Yan's hometown in Shandong province), I went to visit the set, and Zhang Yimou showed me the final draft of his script. It was just a thin few dozen pages," Mo Yan recalls. But then he witnessed how a simple line in the script was turned into the most intense dramatic scene in the movie.

　　Zhang went on to work with other writers, and created a series of movies.

　　Mo Yan says: "Zhang grafts his cinematic art onto novels by different writers. His films naturally have this diversity.

　　"I think we, as novelists, can learn some useful lessons from the director's approach. That means we have to constantly change our narrative angles, explore new story types, create new characters and try to use fresh, creative language.