Nobel Prize

Presentation Speech by Fredrik Böök, Member of the Nobel Committee for Literature, on December 10, 1929 If one asks which innovation the nineteenth century made in the field of literature, which new form it created in addition to the old forms of epic, drama, and lyric, whose roofs are in Greece, the answer must be:…

Presentation Speech by Anders Österling, Member of the Nobel Committee of the on December 10, 1931 If an interested foreigner were to ask one of Erik Axel Karlfeldt’s countrymen what we admire most in this poet and on what qualities his national greatness depends, it would at first seem easy to give an answer. People…

Presentation Speech by Per Hallström, Permanent Secretary of the , on December 10, 1934 The work of Luigi Pirandello is extensive. As an author of novellas he certainly is without equal in output, even in the primary country of this literary genre. Boccaccio’s Decameron contains one hundred novellas; Pirandello’s Novelle per un anno (1922-37) has…

Presentation Speech by Per Hallström, Permanent Secretary of the , on December 10, 1937 The recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1937, Roger Martin du Gard, has dedicated most of his activity to a single work, a long series of novels with the collective title, Les Thibault (1922-40). It is a vast work…

Presentation Speech by Per Hallström Permanent Secretary of the , on December 10, 1938 Pearl Buck once told how she had found her mission as interpreter to the West of the nature and being of China. She did not turn to it as a literary speciality at all; it came to her naturally. «It is…

Presentation Speech by Anders Österling, Permanent Secretary of the In the impressive succession of Nobel Prize winners in Literature, T.S. Eliot marks a departure from the type of writer that has most frequently gained that distinction. The majority have been representatives of a literature which seeks its natural contacts in the public consciousness, and which,…

Presentation Speech by S. Siwertz, Member of the Very seldom have great statesmen and warriors also been great writers. One thinks of Julius Caesar, Marcus Aurelius, and even Napoleon, whose letters to Josephine during the first Italian campaign certainly have passion and splendour. But the man who can most readily be compared with Sir Winston…

Presentation Speech by Anders Österling, Permanent Secretary of the In our modern age, American authors have set their stamp more and more strongly on the general physiognomy of literature. Our generation in particular has, during the last few decades, seen a reorientation of literary interest which implies not only a temporary change in the market…

Presentation Speech by E. Wessén, Member of the Iceland is the cradle of narrative art here in the North. This is ultimately due to the peculiar nature and development of the Icelandic community. In Iceland there were no conditions for the rise of the class society elsewhere so characteristic of the Middle Ages, with its…

Presentation Speech by Anders Österling, Permanent Secretary of the This year’s Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to the Greek poet Giorgos Seferis, who was born in 1900 at Smyrna, which he left at an early age to accompany his family to Athens. After the Greeks were driven out of Asia Minor, and Seferis’s…