Chinese-born novelist and playwright Gao Xingjian, who left China in 1987 to settle in France, won the 2000 Nobel Prize in literature today. Gao is the first literature laureate for six years to come from outside Europe, and the Swedish Academy's choice of the Chinese dissident is bound to upset authorities in Beijing, even though it honours one of the greatest living writers in the Chinese language. 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.
Bureau Report