Nobel Prize

more

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…

more

I was born on May 28th 1912 in Knightsbridge, London, to Australian parents. Victor White was then forty-two, his wife, Ruth Withycombe, ten years younger. When I was six months old my parents returned to Australia and settled in Sydney, principally because my mother could not face the prospect of too many sisters-in-law on the…

Saint-John Perse, born in 1887, pseudonym for Alexis Saint-Léger Léger, came from an old Bourguignon family which settled in the French Antilles in the seventeenth century and returned to France at the end of the nineteenth century. Perse studied law at Bordeaux and, after private studies in political science, went into the diplomatic service in…

French Elfriede Jelinek est née le 20 octobre 1946 dans la ville de Mürzzuschlag dans le «land» autrichien de Styrie. Son père – d’origine tchèque et juive – était chimiste et employé à la recherche de matériel de guerre, de sorte qu’il échappe aux persécutions. Sa mère est issue d’une famille de la haute bourgeoisie…

more

more

more

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…