Nobel Prize

Wole Soyinka was born on 13 July 1934 at Abeokuta, near Ibadan in western Nigeria. After preparatory university studies in 1954 at Government College in Ibadan, he continued at the University of Leeds, where, later, in 1973, he took his doctorate. During the six years spent in England, he was a dramaturgist at the Royal…

Joseph Brodsky was born in 1940, in Leningrad, and began writing poetry when he was eighteen. Anna Akhmatova soon recognized in the young poet the most gifted lyric voice of his generation. From March 1964 until November 1965, Brodsky lived in exile in the Arkhangelsk region of northern Russia; he had been sentenced to five…

Born in Cairo in 1911, Naguib Mahfouz began writing when he was seventeen. His first novel was published in 1939 and ten more were written before the Egyptian Revolution of July 1952, when he stopped writing for several years. One novel was republished in 1953, however, and the appearance of the Cairo Triology, Bayn al…

Joseph Brodsky: A Virgilian Hero, Doomed Never to Return Home by Bengt Jangfeldt This article was published on 12 December 2003. “All my poems are more or less about the same thing – about Time. About what time does to Man.” – Joseph Brodsky Rebel Poet It is impossible to speak about Russian literature without…

Naguib Mahfouz – The Son of Two Civilizations by Anders Hallengren This article was published on 16 October 2003. “I am the son of two civilizations that at a certain age in history have formed a happy marriage. The first of these, seven thousand years old, is the Pharaonic civilization; the second, one thousand four…

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