Mo Yan was born in 1955, in Gaomi County in Shandong to a family of farmers, in Dalan Township (which he fictionalised in his novels as "Northeast Township" of Gaomi County). Mo was 11 years old when the Cultural Revolution was launched, at which time he left school to work as a farmer. At the age of 18, he began work at a cotton factory. During this period, which coincided with a succession of political campaigns from the Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution, his access to literature was largely limited to novels in the socialist realist style under Mao Zedong, which centered largely on the themes of class struggle and conflict.