The award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Gao Xingjian on 12 October 2000 surprised not only the Chinese-reading public but also the rest of the world. No Chinese writer had ever won the prize since its inception in 1901, so there were mounting expectations that an author from China might be named. The veteran novelist Ba Jin and the exiled contemporary poet Bei Dao were frequent suggestions, but Gao's name was rarely mentioned. There had also been rumours concerning Taiwanese writers. Beyond the field of Chinese literature specialists, amongst whom he was known primarily as a playwright and not as a novelist, Gao was largely unknown, or rather he was little known to Anglophone readers, for in France and Sweden his novel Lingshan (Soul Mountain) had been published and acclaimed in the mid-1990s. Naturally, being translated into Swedish made his works more accessible to those who judge the Nobel nominees, but several other Chinese writers had been similarly translated into Swedish, notably by Gao's translator Göran Malmqvist, and many more have been rendered into English and French, languages which present no obstacle to the judges, the Swedish Academy.