China’s Gao Xingjian wins Nobel Literature Prize

Gao (60) won the prize, worth about $ 900,000, "for an oeuvre of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity, which has opened new paths for the Chinese novel and drama," the academy said in its citation.

One of his best known works is Soul Mountain

, in which he portrays an individual’s search for roots, inner peace and liberty via an odyssey in time and space through the Chinese countryside.

Gao, who is now a French citizen, was born in 1940 and grew up in the aftermath of the Japanese invasion of China.

He took a degree in French, but in China’s Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976 he was sent to a re-education camp and burnt a suitcase full of manuscripts.

He was not able to publish or travel abroad until 1979. Many of his experimental plays, produced in Beijing, were popular successes but condemned by Communist Party ideologues.

In 1986, his play The Other Shore

was banned and since then, none of his plays have been performed in China. He left China in 1987 and settled a year later in Paris as a political refugee.

After the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, in which demonstrators in Beijing were killed by the authorities, he left the Communist Party.

He was declared "persona non grata" by China’s government and his works were banned after the publication of a work that takes place against the background of the massacre.

Gao is a translator and director as well as a writer. He also paints in ink, providing the cover illustrations for his own books.