Video

Banquet speech

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Honoured Laureates, Ladies and Gentlemen, One of the things that happen to people who get the Nobel Prize is that they get a lot of media attention. Many interviews. So many that I begin to feel now that I have lost the capacity for spontaneous thought. I…

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Nobel Lecture

English 7 December, 2001 Two Worlds This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true. It might seem strange that a man who has dealt in words…

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Banquet speech

Why do you write? This is the question I’ve been asked most often in my writing career. Most of the time they mean this: What is the point, why do you give your time to this strange and impossible activity? Why do you write … You have to give an excuse, an…

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Prose

English Excerpt from Istanbul: Memories of a City (Istanbul: Hatıralar Ve Şehir). Here we come to the heart of the matter: I’ve never left Istanbul – never left the houses, streets and neighbourhoods of my childhood. Although I’ve lived in other districts from time to time, fifty years on I find myself…

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Nobel Lecture

English My Father’s Suitcase Two years before his death, my father gave me a small suitcase filled with his writings, manuscripts and notebooks. Assuming his usual joking, mocking air, he told me he wanted me to read them after he was gone, by which he meant after he died.…

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Prose

Read the excerpts from The Passport (Der Mensch ist ein großer Fasan auf der Welt) English Excerpts from The Passport THE POT HOLE Around the war memorial are roses. They form a thicket. So overgrown that they suffocate the grass. Their blooms are white, rolled tight like paper. They rustle. Dawn is breaking.…

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Banquet speech

English Your Majesties Your Royal Highnesses Ladies and Gentlemen Dear Friends The trajectory that leads from a child tending cows in the valley to the Stockholm City Hall is a strange one. Here, too, (as is often the case), I am standing beside myself. It was only against my mother’s will that…

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