Nobel Prize

Presentation Speech by Artur Lundkvist, of the Translation from the Swedish text Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, This year’s Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded by the Swedish Academy to the Australian Patrick White. In the – as always – brief citation, mention is made of “his epic and psychological narrative…

  Presentation Speech by Dr. Johannes Edfelt, of the Translation from the Swedish text Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, The exiled and cosmopolitan author Canetti has one native land, and that is the German language. He has never abandoned it, and he has often avowed his love of the highest manifestations of…

  Presentation Speech by Professor Kjell Espmark, of the Translation from the Swedish text Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, When the Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded, for the second time in succession, to a writer from the Spanish-speaking world, it is a reminder of the exceptional literary vitality and richness of…

Presentation Speech by Mr. Östen Sjöstrand, Member of the Translation from the Swedish text Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Irish poet Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry in Northern Ireland. The thatched farmhouse he grew up in was called Mossbawn – a name that has become mythical in Heaney’s poetry.…

Presentation Speech by Professor Sture Allén of the , December 10, 1997. Translation of the Swedish text. Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, To be a jester is, and always has been, a serious matter. Swedish mediaeval laws stipulated that it cost a man smaller fines to lay violent hands on somebody from…

The following account of the work of Frans Eemil Sillanpää is by Per Hallström, Permanent Secretary of the Frans Eemil Sillanpää took the motifs for his novels and novellas, which are almost exclusively about his native land (a small region of Finnish peasants), from the scanty, limited circumstances in which he grew up. From the…

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English Presentation Speech by Professor Horace Engdahl of the , December 10, 2004. Horace Engdahl delivering the Presentation Speech for the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature at the Stockholm Concert Hall. Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, What first perplexes when reading Elfriede Jelinek is the strange, mixed voice that speaks…

Credit: ITN Archive/Reuters

English Biobibliographical Notes Dario Fo, one of the leading figures in modern farce and political drama, was born in 1926 in the village of Sangiano (Varese) in Lombardy, where while still young he came into contact with popular theatrical and narrative traditions (his grandfather was a well-known fabulatore). After studying art and architecture in Milan,…