Gao Xingjian

Gao Xingjian was born on 4 January 1940 in Ganxian District, in the People's Republic of China. He trained in French literature, worked as a translator, and began writing plays and fiction in the late 1970s and 1980s, when Chinese literature was opening to outside influences. His experimental theatre, which drew on Western modernism and Chinese traditions alike, was often controversial at home, and some of his work was banned. After a long journey through remote regions of China, he wrote the novel Soul Mountain. He left China in the late 1980s and later settled in France, becoming a French citizen. He is also a painter. In 2000 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first writer to receive it for work in Chinese. His writing is valued for its inventive form, its focus on individual freedom and inner life, and its refusal to serve political causes.