Nobel Prize

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…

Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957), pseudonym for Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, was born in Vicuña, Chile. The daughter of a dilettante poet, she began to write poetry as a village schoolteacher after a passionate romance with a railway employee who committed suicide. She taught elementary and secondary school for many years until her poetry made her famous. She…

François Mauriac (1885-1970) was born in Bordeaux. His father, a banker, died when he was eighteen months old, leaving his mother with five children, of which he was the youngest. François grew up in a closely sheltered world, first under the protection of his mother, later in a school run by the Marianites. He studied…

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (1890-1960), born in Moscow, was the son of talented artists: his father a painter and illustrator of Tolstoy’s works, his mother a well-known concert pianist. Pasternak’s education began in a German Gymnasium in Moscow and was continued at the University of Moscow. Under the influence of the composer Scriabin, Pasternak took up…

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…

Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov (1905-1984) was born in the land of the Cossacks, now known as the Kamenskaya region of the R.S.F.S.R. He attended several high schools until 1918. During the civil war he fought on the side of the revolutionaries, and in 1922 he moved to Moscow to become a journalist. There he published a…

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father’s side, his grandfather was a prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather’s extensive library, Paz came into early contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also…

  1905 Born on 25 July in Ruse, Bulgaria. Mother tongue Ladino(archaic dialect of Spanish). 1911 Moved to Manchester, England. First school. Earliest lessonsin English. 1912 Sudden death of his father. War breaks out in the Balkans. 1913 His mother moves to Vienna with her three small sons. German lessons from his mother. Elementary school…

Artist: Bo Larsson Calligrapher: Annika Rücker

Works in Spanish Poetry Luna silvestre. – México : Fabula, 1933 No pasaran!. – México : Simbad, 1936 Raíz del hombre. – México : Simbad, 1937 Bajo tu clara sombra y otros poemas sobre España. – Valencia : Españolas, 1937 Entre la piedra y la flor. – México : Nueva Voz, 1938 A la orilla…