Guo Xingjian: Nobel Laureate, Writer, Revolutionary

At the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution in 1967, a young, as yet unpublished writer, hearing that writers were being singled out for persecution, burned a suitcase full of his manuscripts. Short stories, plays, essays and scholarly critiques were gone in a blaze. He fled to a remote mountain village where he lived and worked as a manual labourer for several years. He wrote too, but secretly.

At the end of Mao’s disastrous political campaign, thousands of intellectuals and artists were dead, but Gao Xingjian had survived. He returned to Beijing. The older established writers who survived remained wary, writing little, but Gao became part of a cohort of younger writers who grew emboldened with new freedoms and began to test the political climate with brave and brazen new works. After the long period of enforced silence, Gao wrote prolifically, as he would continue to do for the rest of his writing career...