"who emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden"

Biography:

For the son of Felice and Pina Rota, known for their anti-fascist activities, he was forced to call ahead, after trying to evade, and voluntarily commit to 17 years in 1943 as a paratrooper in the adventurous Republic of Salò, knowing that it was the only way to avoid retaliation on his family. A controversy has long opposed on this point to a journalist in 1975.

"who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality"

Biography:

Born in a family of landless peasants, in Azinhaga, a small village in the province of Ribatejo, on the right bank of the river Almonda, about a hundred miles northeast of Lisbon. My father was Jose de Souza and Maria da Piedade. Jose de Sousa has been on my own not the Registrar, on its own nickname inititiave added to the family and my father was known in the village: Saramago. I would like to add that Saramago is the wild herbal plants, which left at the time as the necessary food for the poor. Only in the age of seven, when for the first identity cards in elementary school, and she realized that my full name is Jose de Sousa Saramago ...

"whose frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history"

Biography:

Grass (formerly spelled: Grass) was born in Danzig autonomous traders parents (owners of a grocery products Colonial). His father was German and his mother Kashubian. The invasion by the Wehrmacht in Poland and Gdansk was approved by his family even if one of the uncles of young Polish Günter is shot after participating at the headquarters of the Polish Post Office (episode recounted in The Tin Drum). Enrolled in the Hitler Youth, the boy asked, to fifteen years, to engage in submarines, but joined at the age of 17 years of the 10th SS Panzer Division Frundsberg of the Waffen-SS in October 1944. At the end of the war, he was taken prisoner by the Americans and released in 1946. During his captivity, he might have met Josef Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI. He says he has no knowledge of the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis after his release and heard confessions of Baldur von Schirach at Nuremberg Trials. Collapsed, horrified by these discoveries, Grass remains in West Germany where he led a bohemian life and trying as best they could to rebuild after tragedies family (his mother and his sister certainly have been raped by soldiers of 'Red Army). After crossing Europe and studied fine arts in Düsseldorf, and West Berlin with Karl Hartung, he earns his living from his sculptures and engravings. Also graphic designer, illustrator and painter, he tries to write, compose poetry and began writing a novel inspired his distant youth.

"for an œuvre of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity, which has opened new paths for the Chinese novel and drama"

Biography:

Gao Xingjian grew up in the reverberations of the Japanese invasion in China Eastern. His father was a banker and his mother-actress amateur. She awakened very early in the interest of his son for the performing arts and writing. He received basic training in schools in the DPRK and obtained a degree in French in 1962, the Institute of Foreign Languages Beijing. It translated into Mandarin writers such as Ionesco, Prévert and Michaux who discover the themes and aesthetics of contemporary Western literature, streams of consciousness to the absurd, his compatriots. During the Cultural Revolution, he was sent for six years in reeducation camp in the countryside and is forced to burn a suitcase in which he had concealed several manuscripts. It is allowed to go abroad after the death of Mao in 1979.