STOCKHOLM Chinese-born dissident writer Gao Xingjian won the 2000 Nobel Literature Prize on Thursday for work that the Swedish academy said had opened new paths for the Chinese novel and drama.
Gao, 60, whose work has been banned in China since 1986, left his native country the following year and settled in France as a political refugee.
He 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 the Beijing authorities, even though it honors one of the greatest living writers in the Chinese language.
The Swedish academy refused to be drawn out on the political ramifications of awarding the world's most prestigious literary prize to a person who is persona nongrata in his homeland.
"We have no geographical or political concerns. It is only the quality of the writing that counts," Horace Engdahl, the academy's permanent secretary, told a news conference.
Gao 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 enacts an individual's search for roots, inner peace and liberty by means of an Odyssey in time and space through the Chinese countryside.
"Gao has been one of the most important writers in creating what didn't quite exist before a spoken drama in China as distinct from music drama, dance and the old traditions," Engdahl said.
"I think it is safe to say that Soul Mountain is one of the most remarkable creations of modern literature, not only Chinese." "He is a great writer of novel and drama and a renewer of both genres in the Chinese context but also a writer that has a universal knowledge to offer readers all over the world," Engdahl said.
Gao, 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 reeducation camp and burnt 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. To avoid harassment he undertook a 10-month walking tour of the forest and mountain regions of Sichuan Province.
In 1987 he left China 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 nongrata" by the regime and his works were banned after the publication of his work "Fugitives", which takes place against the background of this 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.