Unleashing his pen by untying his tongue

Alai's voyage to become the best-known Tibetan author was anything but smooth sailing - especially navigating the choppy waters of writing outside his mother tongue.

Literature became fashionable in China in the early 1980s. Alai then delved into classics penned by such star scribes as Hemingway and Tolstoy while studying tractor driving before he became a middle school teacher.

Alai had never studied written Tibetan. He was born in 1959 in rural Sichuan province, where the Tibetan dialect is unlike the standard Lhasa parlance.