Gao Xingjian: Nobel Prize 2000
Gao Xingjian was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2000—“for an oeuvre of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity, which has opened new paths for the Chinese novel and drama”. For Gao, life is a process of fleeing—from political oppression, from others, even from oneself. “Once the self has been awakened, one cannot flee—this is the tragedy of modern man.”
Playwright, novelist, essayist and painter Gao Xingjian was born in 1940 in Ganzhou, in eastern China. His father worked for a bank, his mother was an actress—who guided her son towards painting and traditional Chinese theater. In 1962, Gao received a degree in French literature from the Beijing Foreign Languages Institute and subsequently was assigned work as an editor and translator at the Foreign Languages Press.
Refusing to conform to the Communist Party’s guidelines for literature, Gao wrote in secret—burning a suitcase full of manuscripts at the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution. Under investigation, he fled to ...
