Nobel Prize

English Presentation Speech by Writer, PhD Jesper Svenbro, Member of the , 10 December 2014. Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Esteemed Laureates, Ladies and Gentlemen, Barely a decade into Patrick Modiano’s oeuvre…

Kailash Satyarthi (born on January 11, 1954) is a human rights activist from India who has been at the forefront of the global movement to end child slavery and exploitation since 1980, when he gave up a lucrative career as an electrical engineer to initiate a crusade against child servitude. As a grass-roots activist, Kailash…

The first sixty-nine years of my life are summed up here, as far as I can remember them. I was born on 30 July 1945 in France, at 11 allée Marguerite, Boulogne-Billancourt, close to Paris. My brother Rudy was born on 5 October 1947. Until the age of four I was brought up by my…

I was born and raised in Fosnavåg, a small town on an island on the west coast of Norway, in one of the most beautiful parts of the country (Fig. 1). My parents owned a small farm, although my father worked as a carpenter. My mother took most of the responsibility for the farm and…

I was born in 1962 on the west coast of Norway, about 200 kilometres north of Bergen. I spent the first 9 months of my life on Haramsøy (Fig. 1), an island with fewer than 500 inhabitants and, at that time, only a single daily ferry connection to the mainland. In 1963 my parents and…

Ancestry I was born on June 24, 1953 at Parks Air Force Base in Pleasanton, California, a city in the eastern region of the San Francisco Bay Area. Although this qualifies me as a California native, after only six weeks, my parents took me back to their home in San Antonio, Texas. From birth, my…

I was born on 23 December 1962 in Arad, a medium-sized, ethnically diverse city in the western part of Romania, directly on the border to Hungary. In those days, Romanian, Hungarian and German were the languages that could be heard on the street in a frequent mix, and most locals – including simple folk -…

I was born and raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a university town. Even though my parents were not affiliated with the university while I was growing up, I think that environment and the people I encountered there really contributed to my latching on to science. My Dad went to the University of Michigan as a…

Shuji Nakamura was born on May 22, 1954 in Oku, a tiny fishing village on the Pacific coast of Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s four main islands. Farming is the principle occupation in Oku. Local farmers grow yams on steps cut into steep hillsides. Shuji’s maternal grandparents owned such a farm. To get to the…

I was born in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan, on September 11, 1960, to my father Tatsuji and mother Yoshiko, and I grew up with younger brother Takashi. Hamamatsu is famous as the birthplace of Professor Kenjiro Takayanagi, a Japanese pioneer in the development of television, who succeeded in transmitting the first Katakana character “イ” by wireless…