Nobel Prize

Presentation Speech by C.D. af Wirsén, Permanent Secretary of the , on December 10, 1905 Wherever the literature of a people is rich and inexhaustible, the existence of that people is assured, for the flower of civilization cannot grow on barren soil. But in every nation there are some rare geniuses who concentrate in themselves…

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  Romain Rolland did not submit an autobiography.

Rudolf Eucken (1846-1926) was born in Aurich, Germany. He studied philosophy, philology, and history at the universities of Göttingen and Berlin and wrote his dissertation on the language of Aristotle. He became a professor of philosophy at Basle in 1871 and from 1874 on held the chair of philosophy at Jena. Eucken was an idealist…

Frans Eemil Sillanpää was born on the 16th of September, 1888, at Ylä-Satakunta in the Hämeenkyrö Parish of Finland on a desolate croft of the same name. The cottage had been built by his parents, his father Frans Henrik Henriksson, who had moved there some ten years before from Kauvatsa in the Kumo Valley, and…

German Elfriede Jelinek wurde am 20. Oktober 1946 in Mürzzuschlag, Steiermark geboren. Ihr Vater war tschechisch-jüdischer Herkunft und überlebte den Holocaust da er als Chemiker mit kriegswichtigen Forschungsaufgaben betraut war. Die Mutter stammte aus einer wohlhabenden Familie in Wien, wo Elfriede Jelinek aufwuchs und zur Schule ging. Sie erhielt frühzeitig Musikunterricht (Klavier, Orgel, Blockflöte) und…

French Dario Fo, une des personnalités de premier plan de la farce moderne et du théâtre politique, naquit en 1926 dans le village de Sangiano (Varese) en Lombardie, où il fut tôt en contact avec le théâtre populaire et la tradition orale (son grand-père était un fabulatore connu). Après des études d’art et d’architecture à…

Presentation Speech by C.D. af Wirsén, Permanent Secretary of the , on December 10, 1906 From the unusually large number of poets and authors proposed for the Nobel Prize this year, the Swedish Academy has chosen a great Italian poet who for a long time has attracted the attention both of the Academy and of…

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…

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,…