STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) — Gao Xingjian, a self-exiled author whose individualistic works are banned in his native China, won the Nobel Prize in literature Thursday — the first Chinese to win the award in its 100-year history.
The Swedish Academy cited the 60-year-old novelist and playwright for his "bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity" in his writings about the struggle for individuality in mass culture.
The award was likely to boost morale among China's dissidents and reinforce Beijing's suspicion of the Nobel Prizes. In 1989, the Peace Prize went to communist China's foe, the Dalai Lama, spiritual leader of Tibet.
Gao survived the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, the mass political upheaval fomented by Mao Tse-tung to rekindle the communist revolution. The novelist and playwright became a leading cultural figure in China but left in 1987 after one of his plays was banned. He settled in France as a political refugee.
"For me, writing is a question of survival," Gao said in an interview in his modest 18th-floor apartment in a Paris suburb. "In China, I could not trust anyone, even my family," he said. "The atmosphere was so poisoned. People even in your own family could turn you in." Gao said he burned "kilos and kilos" of manuscripts in China, where he wrote clandestinely.