Yan Lianke is a Chinese writer born in 1958 in a town in Henan Province. He entered the army in 1978. In 1985 he graduated in Political Science Education at Henan University and in 1991 in literature by the Institute of Art of the People's Liberation Army. He began to write novels from 1979. He retired from the army in 2004. He is currently a lecturer at the Institute of Literature at the People's University of China and a writer. He was nominated in 2012 for the Prince of Asturias Prize.1 He has been selected in the final list of the International Man Booker Prize of 2013 and 2016. In October 2014 he was awarded the Franz Kafka International Literature Prize. A year later he won the Twitter Twitter Literature Prize by popular vote.