Stockholm - Gao Xingjian, a Chinese dissident playwright and author whose innovative work enraged China's ruling elite and shook the halls of literary convention worldwide, won the Nobel Literature Prize yesterday. Gao (60), was awarded the prize "for an oeuvre of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity, which has opened new paths for the Chinese novel and drama," the jury said in its citation.
Among his best-known works is Soul Mountain, an impressionistic search for roots, inner peace and liberty through travels in remote parts of southern China.
Born in Ganzhou in eastern China in 1940, he took French citizenship in 1988 as a political refugee. After the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, Gao formally quit China's Communist Party. After publishing Fugitives, which takes place against the background of that massacre, his works were banned.