Gao Xingjian

Gao Xingjian (born January 4, 1940, in Ganzhou, Jiangxi province, China) is a Chinese-language writer, playwright and novelist, and also a translator, critic and painter. His most important work is the novel Soul Mountain, and in 2000 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He has held French citizenship since 1997 and lives in France, which makes him a central figure of Chinese literature in exile and of experimental drama outside China.

He studied French at the Beijing Foreign Studies University and graduated in 1962. He then worked as a translator, first for the Chinese International Bookstore and, from 1975, as leader of the French translation team of the magazine China Reconstructs. During the Cultural Revolution he was persecuted as an intellectual, sent to the countryside in Anhui province for six years, and forced to destroy much of his early writing so that it would not be discovered.

In the early 1980s he worked as a screenwriter and playwright for the Beijing People's Art Theatre. His play Absolute Signal (1982) is regarded as a breakthrough in Chinese experimental theatre, and The Bus Stop (1983), the best known of his plays, mixes echoes of Waiting for Godot with dialogue full of Beijing idioms. His work draws on the theatre of the absurd, classical Chinese opera, folk culture and European playwrights such as Antonin Artaud.

The campaign against intellectual pollution in the mid-1980s brought him into conflict with the censors. The premiere of Wild Man was delayed until 1985, and from 1986 his new works were no longer allowed on stage. The Other Shore was ordered to stop rehearsals after a month. In 1987 he left China for Paris and settled there, eventually in the suburb of Bagnolet.

After being misdiagnosed with lung cancer in 1986, he set out on a ten-month journey along the Yangtze, and the experience led to Soul Mountain, published in 1990. Part memoir and part novel, it shifts between narrative voices and follows a route from Sichuan province to the coast, with scenes from the lives of minority peoples such as the Qiang, Miao and Yi. Earlier he had published short stories, including Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather.

In 2000 the Swedish Academy honoured him with the Nobel Prize for an oeuvre of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity. Chinese authorities reacted with anger, and the mainland media did not report the award. The prize brought him worldwide fame, and his books began to appear in many languages, Spanish among them. He is also a painter, best known for his ink and wash work, a dimension of his creative life that runs alongside his writing.