The Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded on 12 October, 2000, to Gao Xingjian, the exiled Chinese writer who is best known for daring plays that combine a modernist sensibility with traditional elements from Chinese drama. He is the first Chinese writer to be awarded the Nobel prize in Literature in the 100-year history of the award, which this year is worth about $990,000.

In making the award to Mr. Gao, 60, the Swedish Academy in Stockholm said he had produced a body of work of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity that has opened new paths for the Chinese novel and drama.

But even well-educated Chinese are poorly acquainted with Mr. Gao's works, which have never reached a broader audience beyond patrons of experimental theater in Beijing. ''It's sad that a Chinese has won the Nobel Prize but few people here know his name,'' said Wu Zheng, an editor at Shanghai Daily, an English-language newspaper.

Mr. Gao has lived in a suburb of Paris since 1987 and is also an artist whose paintings have been exhibited around the world. Mr. Gao, who spent the day answering a constantly ringing telephone in his small apartment in Bagnolet, east of Paris, said he was astonished to hear of the award when told during a two-minute call from Stockholm.

''They announced it to me very simply and told me I had to prepare a 45-minute speech,'' he told Reuters Television, speaking in French. ''I said, 'That's very long.' ''

Of his novels, the best known is ''Soul Mountain,'' a long, impressionistic, musing work that arose from a 10-month walking tour Mr. Gao took along the Yangzi River in 1986 following a period of increasing harassment from the Chinese authorities over the content of his plays. The book is a hodgepodge of literary styles and techniques, with a variety of narrators and interwoven tales of people Mr. Gao met on his journey: monks, village elders, victims of the Cultural Revolution and the like.

And, in a thoroughly modernist touch, it is highly self-conscious about its own techniques. At one point, the narrator criticizes the author, saying: ''You've slapped together travel notes, moralistic ramblings, feelings, notes, jottings, untheoretical discussions, unfable-like fables, copied out some folk songs, added some legend-like nonsense of your own, and are calling it fiction!''

Born in 1940 in the eastern Chinese province of Jiangxi, Mr. Gao earned a degree in French in Beijing and embarked on a life of letters. During the Cultural Revolution, he was sent to a re-education camp, where he spent six years at hard labor in the fields. He also burned a suitcase full of his early manuscripts, including novels, plays, and articles on aesthetics.

It was in 1979 that he was first able to publish his work and to travel abroad. During the 1980s, when he worked as the resident playwright at the Beijing Peoples Art Theaters, he produced a prolific stream of short stories, plays, essays and books. Many of them attracted the unwelcome attention of the authorities, including an essay on aesthetics that challenged the social realism espoused by Mao Zedong, and ''Bus Stop,'' a 1983 play strongly influenced by the work of Samuel Beckett that was condemned as intellectual pollution.

He left China in 1987, settled in Paris a year later as a political refugee, and renounced his Communist Party membership after the Tiananmen Square massacre. Shortly afterward, he was declared persona non grata in China. None of his plays have been performed there since.

(From "New York Times", Friday, October 13, 2000)