Nobel Prize

Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), whose real name is Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, was born on 12 July, 1904, in the town of Parral in Chile. His father was a railway employee and his mother, who died shortly after his birth, a teacher. Some years later his father, who had then moved to the town of Temuco,…

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,…

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…

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…

  Verner von Heidenstam did not submit a biography.

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…

I was born on May 7th, 1867, in the village of Kobielo Wielkie in that part of Poland which was under Russian rule. My father was the church organist; the village curate was my mother’s brother, a former monk from the order of Pijar, a very well educated and ascetic man who loved nothing but…

I was born in the little town of Nuoro in Sardinia in 1871. My father was a fairly well-to-do landowner who farmed his own land. He was also a hospitable man and had friends in all of the towns surrounding Nuoro. When these friends and their families had to come to Nuoro on business or…

I come from an old and noble house that has given to Russia a good many illustrious persons in politics as well as in the arts, among whom two poets of the early nineteenth century stand out in particular: Anna Búnina and Vasíly Zhukóvsky, one of the great names in Russian literature, the son of…

I was born December 21, 1917 in Cologne, on the Rhine, the son of the sculptor and cabinet-maker, Viktor Böll, and his wife, Maria, née Hermanns. Between 1924 and 1928 I attended elementary school in Köln Raderthal, and from 1928 to 1937, the state-run Kaiser-Wilhelm classical secondary school in Cologne. In spring 1937 I began…