Nobel Prize

Presentation Speech by Anders Österling, Member of the This year’s Nobel Prize for Literature has, as you all know, been awarded to the Russian writer Mikhail Sholokhov, born in 1905, and now in his sixty-first year. Sholokhov’s childhood was spent in the country of the Don Cossacks; and the strong ties that have always bound…

Presentation Speech by Karl Ragnar Gierow, of the (Translation) Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, Mix a powerful imagination with a logic in absurdum, and the result will be either a paradox or an Irishman. If it is an Irishman, you will get the paradox into the bargain. Even the Nobel Prize in…

Swedish Academy The Permanent Secretary Press release The Nobel Prize in Literature 1972 This year’s winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature made his debut in 1949. A selective bibliography from January 1972 on works by, and about, Heinrich Böll lists some forty volumes from his own hand, disregarding reprints and new editions. Last in…

Swedish Academy The Permanent Secretary Press release The Nobel Prize in Literature 1973 The Australian Patrick White has been awarded the 1973 Nobel Literature Prize “for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature”, as it says in the citation. White’s growing fame is based chiefly on seven novels…

Swedish Academy The Permanent Secretary Press release The Nobel Prize in Literature 1981 Elias Canetti Born in 1905, in the port of Rustschuk on the lower Danube, Elias Canetti belongs to a Sephardic family whose members, in 1492, were driven out of the town of Canete, situated between Cuenca and Valencia. For several hundred years,…

Swedish Academy The Permanent Secretary Press release October 11, 1990 The Nobel Prize in Literature 1990 Octavio Paz “for impassioned writing with wide horizons, characterized by sensuous intelligence and humanistic integrity” This year the Nobel Prize for Literature goes to the Mexican writer, poet and essayist Octavio Paz, honouring a writer of Spanish with a…

Swedish Academy The Permanent Secretary Press release October 8, 1992 The Nobel Prize in Literature 1992 Derek Walcott “for a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment” This year the Swedish Academy has decided to award the Nobel Prize for Literature to Derek Walcott. Walcott, who…

English Swedish Academy The Permanent Secretary Press release October 9, 1997 The Nobel Prize for Literature 1997 Dario Fo “who emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden” Dario Fo, the dramatist and actor, was born at Lago Maggiore, and is 71. His education included studies…

Critical Essay by Per Hallström, Chairman of the Nobel Committee of the This Polish work of imagination has its starting point in the naturalistic novel, especially in the form which that genre received from Zola in France. Reymont has acknowledged that the idea of his book was evoked by La Terre, not through his admiration…

Presentation Speech by Karl Ragnar Gierow, Permanent Secretary of the Translation from the Swedish text Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, He who attempts to seize in a single grasp the bountiful and very varied authorship of Heinrich Böll finds himself holding an abstraction. Through these writings – begun twenty years ago and culminating in…