Gao Xingjian

Gao Xingjian (January 4, 1940 -), born in Ganzhou, Jiangxi Province, is a French-Chinese playwright, novelist, painter, drama and film director, and photographer. He went to Europe in the late 1980s and is now a French citizen. He won the 2000 Nobel Prize for Literature for "opening up new paths for Chinese novels and art dramas." He was also a translator, especially of the works of Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionescu. The stream-of-consciousness works and the consciousness of exile in it have greatly inspired other writers.