Nobel Prize

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen; Distinguished Guests, Friends The other day, suddenly, out of the blue, while we were talking about something completely different, my partner Dorothy burst out as follows: “On the other hand,” she said, “on the other hand, how proud your mother would have been! What…

Kenzaburo Oe was born in 1935, in a village hemmed in by the forests of Shikoku, one of the four main islands of Japan. His family had lived in the village tradition for several hundred years, and no one in the Oe clan had ever left the village in the valley. Even after Japan embarked…

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Kenzaburo Oe: Laughing Prophet and Soulful Healer by Michiko Niikuni Wilson This article was published on 26 January 2007. Kenzaburo Oe, Japan’s second Nobel Laureate in Literature, with his insistence on engaging the reader in a provocative dialogue on the human condition, is one of the most impassioned voices of conscience countering the country’s minimalist…

Imre Kertész: A Medium for the Spirit of Auschwitz by Madeleine Gustafsson This article was published on 17 November 2003. Imre Kertész was born in Budapest on November 9, 1929. Not yet fifteen years old, he was deported together with 7,000 other Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz, and thence to Buchenwald, where he was liberated in…

German Imre Kertész’s speech at the Nobel Banquet, 10 December 2002 Wir erleben heute eine Globalisierung, ja eine Inflation des Holocaust. Der Holocaust-Überlebende, der Auschwitz aus lebendiger Erfahrung kennt, beobachtet das alles aus der ihm zugewiesenen Ecke. Er schweigt, oder er gibt der…

English Imre Kertész’s speech at the Nobel Banquet, 10 December 2002 (Translation) Today we are experiencing a globalization, an inflation of the Holocaust. The Holocaust survivor who knows Auschwitz through the experience of suffering, observes it all from the perspective assigned to him.…

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Nobel Lecture in absentia, by Alice Munro English (pdf, 1.38 MB) (pdf, 202 kB) Alice Munro: In her Own Words Conversation with Alice Munro By Stefan Åsberg, SVT The English text concerning the conversation has been the necessary starting point for the Swedish version. As the work has been done during some…

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