Nobel Prize

Presentation Speech by Harald Hjärne, Chairman of the Nobel Committee of the , on December 10, 1920 The Swedish Academy, in accordance with the statutes of the Nobel Founcation, has awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1919, which was not awarded last year, to the Swiss poet Carl Spitteler for his epic, Olympischer Frühling…

Presentation Speech by Harald Hjärne, Chairman of the Nobel Committee of the , on December 10, 1920 In accordance with the statutes of the Nobel Foundation, the Swedish Academy has awarded the literary Prize for 1920 to the Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun for his work, Markens Grøde (1917) [Growth of the Soil]. It would be…

Presentation Speech by Anders Österling, Permanent Secretary of the Salvatore Quasimodo, the Italian poet who has been awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, is a Sicilian by birth. He was born near Syracuse, to be more exact, in the little town of Modica some distance from the coast. It is not difficult to imagine…

Presentation Speech by Per Hallström, Chairman of the Nobel Committee of the , on December 10, 1923 Very early, in the first bloom of youth, William Butler Yeats emerged as a poet with an indisputable right to the name; his autobiography shows that the inner promptings of the poet determined his relations to the world…

Presentation Speech by Professor Kjell Espmark of the , December 10, 1998. Translation of the Swedish text. Professor Kjell Espmark delivering the Presentation Speech for the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature at the Stockholm Concert Hall. Photo: Hans Mehlin, Nobelprize.org Your Majesties, Your Royal Highness, Ladies and Gentlemen, There is one type of writer who,…

Presentation Speech by Anders Österling, Permanent Secretary of the This year’s Nobel Prize in literature has been awarded to a writer of German origin who has had wide critical acclaim and who has created his work regardless of public favour. The sixty-nine-year-old Hermann Hesse can look back on a considerable achievement consisting of novels, short…

  Presentation Speech by Professor Sture Allén, Permanent Secretary of the Translation from the Swedish text Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, Art is on the side of the oppressed, Nadine Gordimer says in one of her essays, urging us to think before we dismiss this heretical idea about the freedom of art.…

Presentation Speech by Anders Österling, Permanent Secretary of the In a youthful manifesto of 1913 entitled Ordkonst och bildkonst [Verbal Art and Pictorial Art], Pär Lagerkvist, whose name was then unknown, had the audacity to find fault with the decadence of the literature of his time which, according to him, did not answer the requirements…

Swedish Presentationstal av Författaren Kjell Espmark, ledamot av och ledamot i Nobelkommittén för litteratur, 10 december 2011. Eders Majestäter, Eders Kungliga Högheter, ärade Nobelpristagare, mina damer och herrar! Tomas Tranströmer är en av de mycket få svenska författare som haft ett inflytande på världslitteraturen. Han är översatt till ett sextiotal språk och har varit viktig…

Presentation Speech by Karl Ragnar Gierow, of the , on December 10, 1970 Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, Our passports show where and when we were born, facts that are needed to fix our identity. According to a current theory this also applies to authorship. A literary work belongs to its time,…