World

China's Gao Wins Literature Nobel

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

October 12, 2000 / 8:19 AM EDT / CBS

Chinese writer Gao Xingjian won the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2000, the Swedish Academy said on Thursday.

Gao won the prize, worth nearly $1 million, 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.

Gao, 60, is a political refugee and playwright whose works have not been performed in China since his work The Other Shore was banned in 1986, the Swedish Academy said. He left China a year after and lives in Paris, the citation said.

It described him as a novelist, translator, dramatist, director and critic.

Gao is the first Chinese writer to receive the prestigious literature prize.

"In the writing of Gao Xingjian literature is born anew from the struggle of the individual to survive the history of the masses," the academy said in its citation. "He is a perspicacious skeptic who makes no claim to be able to explain the world. He asserts that he has found freedom only in writing."

The literature award — usually the first — was the fifth and last Nobel prize unveiled in Stockholm this week. The Nobel Peace Prize winner will be named Friday in Oslo, Norway

Two Americans won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics on Wednesday for developing theories on how people work and live, contributing greatly to employment training programs and transportation and communication systems

James J. Heckman, 56, of the University of Chicago, and Daniel L. McFadden, 63, of the University of California at Berkeley, were cited for methods of analyzing statistics that have had wide-ranging practical applications, according to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

The physics prize was shared by American Jack Kilby, 76, who invented the integrated circuit at Texas Instruments in 1958, Herbert Kroemer, 72, of the University of California-Santa Barbara, and Zhores Alferov, 70, of the A.F. Ioffe Physico-Technico Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia

This year's chemistry prize went to Alan Heeger, 64, of the University of California-Santa Barbara, Alan MacDiarmid, 73, of the University of Pennsylvania and Hideki Shirakawa, 64, of the University of Tsukuba in Japan, for their discovery that plastic could be modified to conduct electricity

The medicine prize recognized Arvid Carlsson, 77, a professor emiritus of the University of Goteborg in Sweden, Paul Greengard, 74, of Rockefeller University in New York, and Eric Kandel, 70, an Austrian-born U.S. citizen with Columbia University in New York, for discoveries about how messages are transmitted between brain cells, leading to treatments of Parkinson's disease and depression

The Nobel Prizes are funded by a trust set up in the will of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite. Nobel said the literature prize should recognize an author whose work moves in an "ideal direction" without specifying exactly what e meant

Swedish King Carl XVI Gustaf will present the prizes as always on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896

Nobel literature laureates since 1945:

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