Offending the Audience.[Photo provided to China Daily]

Meng says Handke deserved a Nobel years ago.

Debuting in 1966, Offending the Audience was Handke's "anti-play"-a play with no plot and no storyline that relied on the language of insults and curses to engage with the audience.

Meng experienced the play in New York, and decided to sit there alone after the play was meant to have finished. He shared an anecdote about it in Wuzhen, Zhejiang province, in 2016.

"Two of the 28 performers left, I suppose they rushed to the metro, while the remaining actors sat in front me continuing the 'battle' until their manager came," Meng says.

It was also in 2016 that Handke visited China for the first time. Talking about writing the play, Handke recalls how reluctant he was to attend the theater because his girlfriend at that time was an actress, adding that his reasons for writing the play was partly out of his preference as a book reader over joining a stage audience, and partly just to earn money. He says the play was "an analysis of the audience and performances, and projecting voices through language".

As Handke said in a 1970 interview that his "point was to use words to encircle the audience so they could free themselves through heckling".

Yet, as he stressed in his China visit, he was not that much an experimental and avant-garde writer, because he regarded the play as a "classical" work in the style of Aristotle: "So, in this sense, I'm a writer in the classical tradition."

Hu Wei, who teaches and studies German language and literature at Peking University, says that Handke "is a legend and a misfit who doesn't readily belong to anything".

"I'm always breaking rules or boundaries," Handke says during his visit.

Born in 1942 in Austria to a Slovenian mother, he was closer to his mother's family growing up.

His mother's suicide cast a heavy shadow on him. In 1972, he created A Sorrow Beyond Dreams: A Life Story, a semi-autobiographical novella based on her life.