Nobel Prize

Giosuè Carducci (1835-1907) was born in Val di Castello, a small town near Pisa. He was early attracted to the Greek and Roman authors; in addition, he conscientiously studied the Italian classics: Dante, Tasso, and Alfieri. At the age of twenty he graduated with a degree in philosophy and letters from the University of Pisa.…

Saint-John Perse, born in 1887, pseudonym for Alexis Saint-Léger Léger, came from an old Bourguignon family which settled in the French Antilles in the seventeenth century and returned to France at the end of the nineteenth century. Perse studied law at Bordeaux and, after private studies in political science, went into the diplomatic service in…

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…

Rudolf Eucken (1846-1926) was born in Aurich, Germany. He studied philosophy, philology, and history at the universities of Göttingen and Berlin and wrote his dissertation on the language of Aristotle. He became a professor of philosophy at Basle in 1871 and from 1874 on held the chair of philosophy at Jena. Eucken was an idealist…

Frans Eemil Sillanpää was born on the 16th of September, 1888, at Ylä-Satakunta in the Hämeenkyrö Parish of Finland on a desolate croft of the same name. The cottage had been built by his parents, his father Frans Henrik Henriksson, who had moved there some ten years before from Kauvatsa in the Kumo Valley, and…

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…

Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957), pseudonym for Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, was born in Vicuña, Chile. The daughter of a dilettante poet, she began to write poetry as a village schoolteacher after a passionate romance with a railway employee who committed suicide. She taught elementary and secondary school for many years until her poetry made her famous. She…

I was born on 25 December 1906 in Heidelberg as the fifth of seven children of Professor Julius Ruska and his wife Elisbeth (née Merx). After graduating from grammar school in Heidelberg I studied electronics at the Technical College in Munich, studies which I began in the autumn of 1925 and continued two years later…

I was born in Frankfurt, W. Germany, on 7.20., ’47 as the first of two sons. My childhood was very much influenced by the Second World War, which had only just ended. We children had great fun playing among the ruins of the demolished buildings, but naturally were too young to realize that much more…

I was born in Buchs, St. Gallen, Switzerland on 6.6., ’33 as the third child, half an hour after my twin sister. We were fortunate to enjoy a carefree childhood with a sound mixture of freedom, school and farm work. In 1949, the family moved to Zürich and our way of life changed from country…