Nobel Prize

Excerpt from The Garlic Ballads Chapter 16 Arrest me if that’s what you want … Someone read the Criminal Code aloud for me – Blind lawbreakers get lenient treatment – I won’t shut my mouth just because you put me in jail … – from a ballad by Zhang Kou sung after…

English Excerpt from The Search Warrant Eight years ago, in an old copy of Paris Soir dated 31 December 1941, a heading on page three caught my eye: “From Day to Day”.* Below this, I read: PARIS Missing, a young girl, Dora Bruder, age 15, height 1.55m, oval-shaped face, grey-brown eyes, grey…

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…

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.…

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…

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