Nobel Prize

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…

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,…

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…

  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…