Andrew Gordon Sophia Hadjipateras Australian Literary Management

Chinese playwright, novelist, screenwriter, translator and artist Gao Xingjian became a critic of the Communist regime as a young man. He fled Beijing and has lived for many years in France where his best-known novel, Soul Mountain, was first published and became an international bestseller.

In 2000 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, with the citation noting ‘an oeuvre of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity’.

Gao’s last novel, One Man’s Bible (1999), focuses the political horrors of the twentieth century through the lens of desire and memory.