Gao Xingjian

Gao Xingjian was born in Ganzhou, Jiangxi, during the war with Japan; his father worked for the Bank of China, and his mother, who had acted in wartime theatre, drew him toward painting, writing and the stage. After the family settled in Nanjing he studied French at the Beijing Foreign Studies University, graduating in 1962, and worked as a translator. During the Cultural Revolution he was sent to labour in the countryside of Anhui and destroyed his early manuscripts. Allowed back to Beijing in 1975, he worked as a translator, and became known for his versions of French and European dramatists, among them Beckett and Ionesco.

As resident playwright at the Beijing People’s Art Theatre from 1981, he introduced techniques of the European avant-garde into Chinese drama. Absolute Signal (1982) was a landmark of experimental theatre; The Bus Stop, in which travellers wait years for a bus that never stops, was condemned by officials, and The Other Shore was halted in rehearsal. After a mistaken cancer diagnosis in 1986 he travelled for months through the remote southwest, a journey that became Soul Mountain, a novel narrated through shifting pronouns that mixes travelogue, folklore and introspection.

Gao left China in 1987 and settled in France. His play Fugitives, set in the aftermath of Tiananmen Square, led to a ban on his work in China, and in 1997 he became a French citizen. One Man’s Bible (1999) revisited the Cultural Revolution. He was the first writer in Chinese to receive the Nobel Prize, an honour the Chinese authorities received coldly. He has since devoted much of his time to ink painting and to film, alongside his writing for the stage.