Gao Xingjian

Gao's father was a clerk in the Bank of China, and his mother was a member of YMCA. His mother was once a playactress of Anti-Japanese Theatre during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Under his mother's influence, Gao enjoyed painting, writing and theatre very much when he was a little boy. During his middle school years, he read much translated literature from the West, and he studied sketching, ink and wash painting, oil painting and clay sculpture under the guidance of painter Yun Zongying (simplified Chinese: 郓宗嬴; traditional Chinese: 鄆宗嬴; pinyin: Yùn Zōngyíng).

In 1950, his family moved to Nanjing. In 1952, Gao entered the Nanjing Number 10 Middle School (later renamed Jinling High School) which was the Middle School attached to Nanjing University.

In 1957 Gao graduated, and, following his mother's advice, chose Beijing Foreign Studies University (BFSU) instead of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, although he was thought to be talented in art.

In 1962 Gao graduated from the Department of French, BFSU, and then he worked for the Chinese International Bookstore (中國國際書店). During the 1970s, because of the Down to the Countryside Movement, he was persecuted as a public intellectual, forced to destroy his early writings, and was sent to the countryside to do hard labor in Anhui Province for six years.[3] He taught as a Chinese teacher in Gangkou Middle School, Ningguo county, Anhui Province for a short time. In 1975, he was allowed to go back to Beijing and became the group leader of French translation for the magazine China Reconstructs (《中國建設》).

In 1977 Gao worked for the Committee of Foreign Relationship, Chinese Association of Writers. In May 1979, he visited Paris with a group of Chinese writers including Ba Jin. In 1980, Gao became a screenwriter and playwright for the Beijing People's Art Theatre.

Gao is known as a pioneer of absurdist drama in China, where Signal Alarm (《絕對信號》, 1982) and Bus Stop (《車站》, 1983) were produced during his term as resident playwright at the Beijing People's Art Theatre from 1981 to 1987. Influenced by European theatrical models, it gained him a reputation as an avant-garde writer. His other plays, The Primitive (1985) and The Other Shore (《彼岸》, 1986), all openly criticised the government's state policies.

In 1986 Gao was misdiagnosed with lung cancer, and he began a 10-month trek along the Yangtze, which resulted in his novel Soul Mountain (《靈山》). The part-memoir, part-novel, first published in Taipei in 1990 and in English in 2000 by HarperCollins Australia, mixes literary genres and utilizes shifting narrative voices. It has been specially cited by the Swedish Nobel committee as "one of those singular literary creations that seem impossible to compare with anything but themselves." The book details his travels from Sichuan province to the coast, and life among Chinese minorities such as the Qiang, Miao, and Yi peoples on the fringes of Han Chinese civilization.

By the late 1980s, Gao had shifted to Bagnolet, a city adjacent to Paris, France. The political drama Fugitives[4] (1989), which makes reference to the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, resulted in all his works being banned from performance in China.

Gao first saw success and gained critical recognition with the publication of his novella Hanye zhong de xingchen (1980; "Stars on a Cold Night"). He became a resident playwright with the Beijing People's Art Theatre in 1981, and in 1982 he wrote his first play.[7] His most celebrated play, the absurd drama Chezhan (1983; Bus Stop) incorporated various European techniques from European Theater. It was openly condemned by Communist Party officials.[8] In 1986 his play The Other Shore was banned and since then none of his other plays have been performed on the mainland.[9]

The Premier Zhu Rongji delivered a congratulatory message to Gao when interviewed by the Hong Kong newspaper East Daily (《东方日报》):

• Q.: What's your comment on Gao's winning Nobel Prize ?
• A.: I am very happy that works written in Chinese can win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Chinese characters have a history of several thousand years, and Chinese language has an infinite charm, (I) believe that there will be Chinese works winning Nobel Prizes again in the future. Although it's a pity that the winner this time is a French citizen instead of a Chinese citizen, I still would like to send my congratulations both to the winner and the French Department of Culture. (Original words: 我很高兴用汉语写作的文学作品获诺贝尔文学奖。汉字有几千年的历史，汉语有无穷的魅力，相信今后还会有汉语或华语作品获奖。很遗憾这次获奖的是法国人不是中国人，但我还是要向获奖者和法国文化部表示祝贺。)

Gao's work has led to fierce discussion among Chinese writers, both positive and negative.

In his article on Gao in the June 2008 issue of Muse, a now-defunct Hong Kong magazine, Leo Ou-fan Lee praises the use of Chinese language in Soul Mountain: 'Whether it works or not, it is a rich fictional language filled with vernacular speeches and elegant 文言 (classical) formulations as well as dialects, thus constituting a "heteroglossic" tapestry of sounds and rhythms that can indeed be read aloud (as Gao himself has done in his public readings).'[10]

Before 2000, a dozen Chinese writers and scholars already predicted Gao's winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, including Hu Yaoheng (Chinese: 胡耀恒)[11] Pan Jun (潘军)[12] as early as 1999.

• 1985, DAAD Fellowship, Germany
• 1989, Asian Cultural Council Fellowship, United States
• 1992, Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
• 2000, Nobel Prize in Literature
• 2000, Premio Letterario Feronia in Rome
• 2001, honorary doctorate by Chinese University of Hong Kong
• 2001, honorary doctorate by National Sun Yat-sen University
• 2002, honorary doctorate by National Chiao Tung University
• 2002, Legion of Honour by then French President Jacques Chirac
• 2002, Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement[13]
• 2003, l'Anne Gao Xingjian, the City of Marseille
• 2005, honorary doctorate by National Taiwan University
• 2006, Lions Award, by the New York Public Library (NYPL) at Library Lions Benefit event