Nobel Prize

Odd Hassel was born in Kristiania (now Oslo), Norway, I7 May, 1897. His father was Ernst Hassel, a physician who specialized in gynaecology, his mother Mathilde née Klaveness. In 1915 he entered the University of his native town where he studied mathematics and physics with chemistry as his chief subject and graduated as a cand.…

Willard Frank Libby was born in Grand Valley, Colorado, on 17th December, 1908, to Ora Edward Libby and his wife Eva May (née Rivers). He attended grammar and high schools near Sebastopol, California, between 1913 and 1926, moving to the University of California at Berkeley in 1927, where he studied till 1933, taking his B.Sc.…

Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881-1958) belonged to the group of writers who, in the wake of Spain’s loss of her colonies to the United States (1898), staged a literary revival. The leader of this group of modernistas, as they called themselves, Rubén Darío, helped Juan Ramón to publish Almas de violeta (Souls of Violet), 1900, his…

Jacobus Henricus van ‘t Hoff was born in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, on August 30, 1852. He was the third child in a family of seven children of Jacobus Henricus van ‘t Hoff, a physician, and Alida Jacoba Kolff. In 1869 he entered the Polytechnic School at Delft and obtained his technology diploma in 1871. His decision…

I was born on June 2, 1857, in the Roholte vicarage at Praestö. My father was Pastor Carl Adolph Gjellerup, my mother, Anna Fibiger. After my father’s death in 1860, in Landet vicarage on Lolland (from which I still have a number of memories), I went in November of the same year to the home…

Salvatore Quasimodo (1901-1968) was born of Sicilian parents in Modica, near Syracuse. Desiring to become an engineer, he attended technical schools in Palermo and later enrolled at the Politecnico in Rome. In addition, he studied Latin and Greek at the University there. However, for economic reasons he was unable to complete his studies. He obtained…

I was born on April 24, 1845, in the little town of Liestal in the Canton of Baselland. When I was four we moved to Bern, where my father had been appointed treasurer of the newly established Swiss Confederacy. In the winter of 1856-57 I returned home with my parents. I attended the Gymnasium at…

William Golding was born in Cornwall in 1911 and was educated at Marlborough Grammar School and at Brasenose College, Oxford. Apart from writing, his past and present occupations include being a schoolmaster, a lecturer, an actor, a sailor, and a musician. His father was a schoolmaster and his mother was a suffragette. He was brought…

Written over the author’s signature and translated into English by Fernando Rodrigues and Tim Crosfield I was born in a family of landless peasants, in Azinhaga, a small village in the province of Ribatejo, on the right bank of the Almonda River, around a hundred kilometres north-east of Lisbon. My parents were José de Sousa…

Knut Hamsun (1859-1952) was born in Gudbrandsdalen, Norway, and grew up in poverty in Hamarøy in Nordland. From early childhood he was a shoemaker’s apprentice, but was also a road worker, stonemason, junior-level teacher, and so on. He spent some years in America, travelling and working as a tram driver, and published his impressions, chiefly…