Nobel Prize

Nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature each year (1901-1950) The number of nominations presented here are the total number of nominations that particular year – not the number of suggested induviduals, nor the number of approved nominations the particular Nobel Laureate recieved that year. All information concerning the nominations and selections of the Nobel…

Broadcast Lecture by Per Hallström, Chairman of the Nobel Committee of the Among Johannes V. Jensen’s prose works Den lange rejse (1908-22) [The Long Journey] stands foremost in popular estimation. The theme of this immense epic is man’s development from the soulless and inarticulate herd-life when more than any other creature he was a prey…

Presentation Speech by C.D. af Wirsén, Permanent Secretary of the , on December 10, 1911 This year highly competent persons have proposed several men of letters as candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Several among them presented such great and unusual qualities that it has been very difficult to weigh their respective merits. In…

Presentation Speech by Per Hallström, Chairman of the Nobel Committee of the , on December 10, 1922 Jacinto Benavente has devoted his imaginative gifts mainly to the theatre, and it seems as if he has systematically guided the course of his development in this direction through many varieties of experience. But with this imaginative artist,…

Presentation Speech by Per Hallström, Chairman of the Nobel Committee of the , on December 10, 1928 In her first novels or novellas, all of them remarkable works, Sigrid Undset painted the present-day world of young women in the environs of Christiania. It was a restless generation, prompt to make the gravest decisions as soon…

Presentation Speech by Anders Österling, Permanent Secretary of the , December 10, 1945 Today Johannes V. Jensen will receive in person the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1944, and we are happy to salute the great Danish writer who since the beginning of the century has been in the front rank, always active, for a…

Presentation Speech by Anders Österling, Permanent Secretary of the On the first page of the remarkable journal kept by André Gide for half a century, the author, then twenty years old, finds himself on the sixth floor of a building in the Latin Quarter, looking for a meeting place for «The Symbolists», the group of…

Presentation Speech by Hjalmar Gullberg, Member of the A long life consecrated to poetry and to beauty has been honoured this year with the Nobel Prize in Literature. He is an old gardener, this Juan Ramón, who has dedicated half a century to the creation of a new rose, a white mystical rose, which will…

Swedish Academy The Permanent Secretary Press release The Nobel Prize in Literature 1979 Odysseus Alepoudhélis (pseudonym Odysseus Elytis) Odysseus Elytis’s name tells us a great deal about him as a person and a writer. Odysseus – the seafarer, the Homeric poem’s hero, alive with the spirit of freedom, with defiant intrepidity, enterprise, and an insatiable…

Swedish Academy The Permanent Secretary Press release The Nobel Prize in Literature 1980 Czeslaw Milosz Czeslaw Milosz was born in Lithuania, in 1911, to a family with a background of ancient lineage and in an environment in which primitive folk traditions lived on together with a complex historical heritage. Industrialization had not made itself felt…