Nobel Prize

Vicente Aleixandre was born in Sevilla (Spain) on April 26, 1898. He spent his childhood in Malaga and he has lived in Madrid since 1909. Studied law at the University of Madrid and at the Madrid School of Economics. Beginning in 1925 he has completely devoted himself to literature. His first book of poems, Ambit,…

Roger Martin du Gard (1881-1958) was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, attended two of the finest Paris lycees and, in 1906, was graduated from the École des Chartes with a thesis on an archaeological subject and with the degree of archivist-paleographer. To this training in history and scholarship he attributes his scrupulous realism and attention to minute…

Pearl Buck (1892-1973) was born in Hillsboro, West Virginia. She grew up in China, where her parents were missionaries, but was educated at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College. After her graduation she returned to China and lived there until 1934 with the exception of a year spent at Cornell University, where she took an M.A. in 1926.…

Herta Müller was born in 1953 in Nitzkydorf, a German-speaking village in the Banat, a region that had passed from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to Romania in the wake of the First World War. During the Second World War, Romania had allied with the National-Socialist German Reich, and like many of the Romanian-Germans, Herta Müller’s father…

Giorgos Seferis was born in Smyrna, Asia Minor, in 1900. He attended school in Smyrna and finished his studies at the Gymnasium in Athens. When his family moved to Paris in 1918, Seferis studied law at the University of Paris and became interested in literature. He returned to Athens in 1925 and was admitted to…

Turkish İstanbul adlı kitabımın bir yarısı şehirden söz eder, bir yarısı da yirmi iki yaşıma kadarki hayat hikayemdir. Kitabı yazıp bitirdiğimde aşırı bir hayal kırıklığına kapıldığımı hatırlıyorum. Kendi hayatımda anlatmak istediğim, vazgeçilmez bir hatıra olarak gördüğüm şeylerin onda birini bile İstanbul’a koyamamıştım. Yirmi iki yaşıma kadarki hayatımı özetleyen ve bambaşka hatıralarla kurulmuş yirmi cilt anı…

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) was born in St. Louis, Missouri, of an old New England family. He was educated at Harvard and did graduate work in philosophy at the Sorbonne, Harvard, and Merton College, Oxford. He settled in England, where he was for a time a schoolmaster and a bank clerk, and eventually literary editor…

Jean-Paul Sartre, (1905-1980) born in Paris in 1905, studied at the École Normale Supérieure from 1924 to 1929 and became Professor of Philosophy at Le Havre in 1931. With the help of a stipend from the Institut Français he studied in Berlin (1932) the philosophies of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. After further teaching at…

I was born in Lübeck on June 6, 1875, the second son of a merchant and senator of the Free City, Johann Heinrich Mann, and his wife Julia da Silva Bruhns. My father was the grandson and great-grandson of Lübeck citizens, but my mother first saw the light of day in Rio de Janeiro as…

Naipaul is Truly a Nobel Man in a Free State by David Pryce-Jones The Nobel Prize for literature has gone to someone who deserves it. Like the great masters of the past, V.S. Naipaul tells stories which show us ourselves and the reality we live in. His use of language is as precise as it…