Gao Xingjian

Chinese author and artist born in Ganzhou, Jiangxi province in eastern China. His father was a bank clerk and his mother an amateur actress who inspired Gao to write, paint and play the violin from an early age. After graduating from middle school he studied literature and French at the Beijing Foreign Studies University, graduating in 1962. During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) he worked as a French translator at the magazine Construction in China. His mother was sent to the countryside where she drowned in an accident and Gao was forced to work as a farm labourer.