“There is never enough discussion about the Cultural Revolution,” Yan said recently in Hong Kong, where is a guest lecturer of Chinese literature for six months at the city’s University of Science and Technology.

“The more we talk about it and the more critical are our reflections on it, the more China will progress for the better. But China will go backwards if we keep avoiding the subject.”

According to Yan, what conversation there is on the Cultural Revolution mirrors how the country’s intellectuals confront history.

“We will have to resume the discussion about Cultural Revolution sooner or later, to understand its problems,” he said.

Regarded as one of China’s most acclaimed yet controversial writers, Yan is known for his poignant satire and piercing language in covering China’s darkest history.

In person, however, the 58-year-old is quite the opposite; softly spoken and amiable. “I have always thought that my writing is full of positive energy,” he said.

Yan’s main topic of interest is how people survive in extreme conditions.

“I have never thought that I must write about sensitive issues. I have always intended to write about memories of reality, and to explore human existence amid those realities,” he said.

Nonetheless, Yan’s work continuously falls foul of China’s censors. And for writers like Yan, censorship in today’s China is becoming increasingly tighter.

“I wasted a lot of time when I was writing Lenin’s Kisses and Elegy and Academe. I should have done much better especially with Lenin’s Kisses. But I spent too much time on self-censoring. I wanted my book to be published,” said Yan.

Lenin’s Kisses is a black comedy on the money-making fever that swept China in the 1990s, while Elegy and Academe satirises the vanity of China’s modern day intellectuals.

Yan said that while the creative space for writers has shrunk in recent years, there remain cracks that writers can slip through.

“In fact, a writer’s self-censorship is even tighter that the government’s,” he said. “And [writers themselves] may not even admit or be aware that this type of self-censorship exists.”

But Yan said as he mature with his age and his writing profession, Yan is finally able to break free from censorship and having written what he called as his proudest work to date.

“I no longer think about it [the censorship]. I wrote The Four Books exactly how I wanted it to be. Whether it could be published [in the mainland] did not concern me when I wrote it,” he said.

His recently nominated work, The Four Books, is set in a labour camp in Northern China close to the Yellow river. It tells of a group of intellectuals sent to the countryside for political “re-education” as Chairman Mao Zedong launched his Great Leap Forward, a series of aggressive and eventually disastrous policies designed to boost the economy “to catch up with the US and surpass the UK”.

The characters, who are known only by their former professions – such as Author, Musician and Scholar – must complete challenges set by the government, referred to as The Higher-ups. The tasks include growing a vast amount of wheat and produce huge quantities of steel before they can win their freedom. But the aggressive policy fails, squandering natural resources and resulting in a massive famine.

The gruelling process leaves many intellectuals abandoning their talent, morality and ethics, as they resort to eating the dead at the height of the famine.

“I focus on how intellectuals deal with predicaments like this,” Yan said. “Intellectuals eating human flesh is different from an ordinary person doing so.”

Intellectuals were regarded with great respect in traditional Chinese culture and regarded as society’s moral compass and driver of social change.

But as a group they became stigmatised under Mao’s rule in a bid to silence criticism and deter the Western modernisation in China.

Yan said while he is highly critical of the characters’ flaws and weaknesses, he treats them with love, sympathy and understanding, except for one whom he calls The Child.

The leading of the group, this mysterious character is a strange hybrid of a simple-minded young boy and draconian leader.

The Child is easily pleased when he hears of promises to be allowed to visit Beijing to meet the top leaders. But he is also relentlessly ruthless, and orders the intellectuals to burn their forbidden books and to abandon their religion or faith.

“The Child is a unique presence not only in the novel, but also in Chinese literature, and even world literature. He is Evil but also a God. He can Hitler or Mao. He is a very complex character who both naïve, and equally capable of evil and good,” said Yan.

Such complexity is a reason why Yan spent 20 years planning the story and just six months to write it, searching for the right character and right language for his finest work yet.

The winner of the 2016 Man Booker International prize will be announced in London on May 16.