Yan Lianke

Yan Lianke is a Chinese novelist and short story writer whose fiction portrays the people society marginalizes, often through magical realism. His novel The Four Books is among his works translated abroad. He won China's Lu Xun Literature Prize and Lao She Literature Prize and was shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker International Prize. In 2014 he became the first Chinese author to receive the Franz Kafka Prize, an annual Czech award established in 2001 that honors a whole body of work, and only the second Asian writer to win it after Haruki Murakami in 2006. The Four Books had been translated into Czech, a requirement for eligibility for the prize.