Nobel Prize

My father, Dines Pontoppidan, belonged to an old family of clergymen and was himself a minister. My mother, whose maiden name was Oxenbøl, was the daughter of a government official. They had sixteen children. One of the middle ones in the flock, I was born on July 24, 1857, in the small Jutland town of…

Descendant of an old family of Lesbos, he was born in Heraclion (Candia) on the island of Crete, November 2, 1911. Some time later his family settled permanently in Athens where the poet finished his secondary school studies and later visited the Law School of the Athens University. His first appearance as a poet in…

Czesław Miłosz was born June 30, 1911 in Seteiniai, Lithuania, as a son of Aleksander Miłosz, a civil engineer, and Weronika, née Kunat. He made his high-school and university studies in Wilno, then belonging to Poland. A co-founder of a literary group “Zagary”, he made his literary début in 1930, published in the 1930s two…

Henri Moissan was born in Paris on September 28, 1852. His advanced education began in the Collège de Meaux and later in Edmond Frémy’s laboratory at the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle, where he attended lectures by E.H. Sainte-Claire Deville and Henri Debray. A year later, he removed to Dehérain’s laboratory in the École Pratique des Haute…

My father’s family came from Østerdalen. The first ancestor of ours of whom anything at all was known was one Peder Halvorsen who, in 1730, lived in Grytdalen in the Sollien valley of the river Atna where some men from Østerdalen had been allowed to settle and farm the land. My father’s folk remained there…

Adolf Frederick Johann Butenandt was born on March 24, 1903 at Bremerhaven-Wesermünde. The son of a business man Otto Butenandt of Hamburg, he went to school at Bremerhaven and studied chemistry at the Universities of Marburg and Göttingen. In 1927 he graduated at the University of Göttingen, where he had studied under From 1927 until…

Robert Burns Woodward was born in Boston on April 10th, 1917, the only child of Margaret Burns, a native of Glasgow, and Arthur Woodward, of English antecedents, who died in October, 1918, at the age of thirty-three. Woodward was attracted to chemistry at a very early age, and indulged his taste for the science in…

Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949), born in Ghent, Belgium, came from a well-to-do family. He was educated at a Jesuit college and read law, but a short practice as a lawyer in his home town convinced him that he was unfit for the profession. He was drawn toward literature during a stay in Paris, where he associated…

André Gide (1869-1951) came from a family of Huguenots and recent converts to Catholicism. As a child he was often ill and his education at the École Alsacienne was interrupted by long stays in the South, where he was instructed by private tutors. His Les Cahiers d’André Walter (1891) [The Notebooks of André Walter] opened…

I was born in Halifax, Yorkshire on January 7th, 1941 to Thomas Ernest Walker and Elsie Walker (née Lawton). My father was a stone mason, and a talented amateur pianist and vocalist. I was brought up with my two younger sisters, Judith and Jennifer, in a rural environment overlooking the Calder valley near Elland, and…