Yan often gets named as the inventor of mythorealism, a strain of modernism that, he writes, eschews easy 'access to truth and reality. Guessing its next development is no likelier than guessing who will win the next Nobel - and it is a deeply satisfying read as a result. Satirical novels too often start and end on the same note, which effectively guarantees a loss of momentum.

All this variety lets Yan, a career-long satirist, avoid the trap most common to his chosen form. Heart Sutra starts out seeming like a romantic comedy by its end, it has moved through absurdity, darkness, and body horror into a strange and flickering form of hope. Yan treats the deities of China's major religions - Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, and both Protestant and Catholic Christianity - as quiet, omnipresent participants in the novel's events, which range from slapstick comedy to shocking violence. Heart Sutra is a warm-hearted, if not gentle, satire that skewers religious institutions without mocking faith itself. A former Army propagandist in his mid-60s, he has earned global renown for his sprawling body of work, which includes a memoir, many novels and novellas, and heaps of short stories and literary criticism.Īt first, his writing was met with equal warmth at home - but now his work is subject to a de facto ban tough enough that his latest novel, Heart Sutra, translated into English by Carlos Rojas, has not been released in China at all. But Yan does seem like an ideal candidate. Guessing who the Academy will pick and why is - as the odds over the years have shown - a fool's errand. In 2022, the British gambling aggregator NicerOdds gave him a 25-to-1 chance, the same as Edna O'Brien, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Scholastique Mukasonga - though lower than Annie Ernaux, who won. Every year, when readers and bookies begin asking who is likely to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Chinese novelist Yan Lianke appears in the conversation.

Heart radio