Gao Xingjian spent six years in a re-education camp during China's Cultural Revolution. The Communist Party classified him as a class enemy. His manuscripts were burned. He rewrote them from memory. Born in Ganzhou, Jiangxi Province on January 4, 1940, he studied French literature at the Beijing Foreign Studies University and became one of China's most experimental playwrights and novelists in the early 1980s, during a brief cultural thaw. His plays drew on Artaud, Brecht, and traditional Chinese opera in ways the authorities found threatening. The government banned his work in 1986 after his play The Other Shore was deemed subversive. He left China in 1987 on the pretext of accepting an invitation to Germany, and never returned. He settled in Paris, became a French citizen in 1998, and continued writing in Chinese. His novel Soul Mountain took seven years to complete. It is a sprawling, polyphonic journey through remote Chinese provinces, part autobiography, part philosophical meditation, part travel narrative. The narrator shifts between "I," "you," and "he" within single paragraphs, dissolving the boundary between self and other. The Chinese government called it decadent. The Swedish Academy called it a masterpiece and awarded him the 2000 Nobel Prize in Literature, citing "an oeuvre of universal validity, bitter insights, and linguistic ingenuity." He was the first Chinese-language writer to receive the honor. Beijing denounced the decision as politically motivated and censored all coverage of the award. Gao also paints, directs films, and composes. His ink wash paintings have been exhibited in galleries worldwide. He lives in Paris and writes in a style that merges Western modernism with Chinese philosophical traditions, producing work that belongs fully to neither culture and partially to both.