Nobel Prize

Knut Hamsun (1859-1952) was born in Gudbrandsdalen, Norway, and grew up in poverty in Hamarøy in Nordland. From early childhood he was a shoemaker’s apprentice, but was also a road worker, stonemason, junior-level teacher, and so on. He spent some years in America, travelling and working as a tram driver, and published his impressions, chiefly…

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was born in Dublin. His father was a lawyer and a well-known portrait painter. Yeats was educated in London and in Dublin, but he spent his summers in the west of Ireland in the family’s summer house at Connaught. The young Yeats was very much part of the fin de siècle…

Pär Lagerkvist (1891-1974), son of station master Anders Johan Lagerkvist and Johanna Blad, was born in the south of Sweden. He decided early that he was going to be a writer and, after a year at the University of Uppsala, he left for Paris (1913), where he came under the influence of expressionism, especially in…

Salvatore Quasimodo (1901-1968) was born of Sicilian parents in Modica, near Syracuse. Desiring to become an engineer, he attended technical schools in Palermo and later enrolled at the Politecnico in Rome. In addition, he studied Latin and Greek at the University there. However, for economic reasons he was unable to complete his studies. He obtained…

Born in 1900 at Svartbjörnsbyn near Boden in the north of Sweden. Parents, Olof Petter J., stonecutter from Värmland, and Cevia Gustafsdotter from Blekinge. There were six children in the family, of whom E.J. was the next youngest. His father fell ill with silicosis about 1904, and E.J. was taken care of by his childless…

Harry Martinson was born at Jämshög in 1904. He was left an orphan at an early age, and after a chequered childhood, in which the children’s homes and institutions were as numerous as the escapes, he went to sea at the age of sixteen, spending six years of his life on board various ships and…

William Golding was born in Cornwall in 1911 and was educated at Marlborough Grammar School and at Brasenose College, Oxford. Apart from writing, his past and present occupations include being a schoolmaster, a lecturer, an actor, a sailor, and a musician. His father was a schoolmaster and his mother was a suffragette. He was brought…

Nadine Gordimer’s speech at the Nobel Banquet, December 10, 1991 Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Your Excellencies, Fellow Laureates, Ladies and Gentlemen, When the six-year-old daughter of a friend of mine overheard her father telling someone that I had been awarded the Nobel Prize, she asked whether I had ever received it before. He replied…

John Maxwell Coetzee was born in Cape Town, South Africa, on 9 February 1940, the elder of two children. His mother was a primary school teacher. His father was trained as an attorney, but practiced as such only intermittently; during the years 1941–45 he served with the South African forces in North Africa and Italy.…

Harry Martinson: Catching the dewdrop, reflecting the cosmos by Ulf Larsson Introduction In October 1974 it was announced that the Nobel Prize in Literature for that year had been awarded to and . In the pages of several Swedish newspapers, the announcement provoked indignant reactions. The Swedish Academy had awarded the Prize to two of…