Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2000 23:53:52 -0600 (MDT)
Subject: China's Gao Xingjian Wins Nobel Literature Prize (1)  



Thursday October 12 8:01 AM ET

China's Gao Xingjian Wins Nobel Literature Prize

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Chinese-born novelist and playwright Gao Xingjian,
who left China in 1987 to settle in France, won the 2000 Nobel Prize in
Literature on Thursday.

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 honors 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 burned 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.

The Nobel prizes, first awarded in 1901, were created by Swedish 
industrialist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, who died in 1896. 

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