Nobel Prize

Presentation Speech by Anders Österling, Permanent Secretary of the This year’s Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to the Greek poet Giorgos Seferis, who was born in 1900 at Smyrna, which he left at an early age to accompany his family to Athens. After the Greeks were driven out of Asia Minor, and Seferis’s…

Presentation Speech by C.D. af Wirsén, Permanent Secretary of the on December 10, 1904 One sometimes hears it said that the Nobel Prizes should be awarded to authors still in the prime of life and consequently at the height of their development, in order to shelter them from material difficulties and assure them a wholly…

Presentation Speech by Anders Österling, Permanent Secretary of the In the impressive succession of Nobel Prize winners in Literature, T.S. Eliot marks a departure from the type of writer that has most frequently gained that distinction. The majority have been representatives of a literature which seeks its natural contacts in the public consciousness, and which,…

Presentation Speech by C.D. af Wirsén, Permanent Secretary of the , on December 10, 1906 From the unusually large number of poets and authors proposed for the Nobel Prize this year, the Swedish Academy has chosen a great Italian poet who for a long time has attracted the attention both of the Academy and of…

Presentation Speech by Professor Sture Allén of the , December 10, 1997. Translation of the Swedish text. Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, To be a jester is, and always has been, a serious matter. Swedish mediaeval laws stipulated that it cost a man smaller fines to lay violent hands on somebody from…

Presentation Speech by Harald Hjärne, Director of the , on December 10, 1908 Alfred Nobel was a man of action who, during his successful business career in the competing markets of many countries and in the international trade centres, had developed an awareness of the inner contradictions and dangers of modern developments. Mankind still seemed…

Presentation Speech by Karl Ragnar Gierow, of the (Translation) Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, Mix a powerful imagination with a logic in absurdum, and the result will be either a paradox or an Irishman. If it is an Irishman, you will get the paradox into the bargain. Even the Nobel Prize in…

Presentation Speech by Mr. Östen Sjöstrand, Member of the Translation from the Swedish text Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Irish poet Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry in Northern Ireland. The thatched farmhouse he grew up in was called Mossbawn – a name that has become mythical in Heaney’s poetry.…

Presentation Speech by Anders Österling, Permanent Secretary of the The student of François Mauriac’s works will be struck from the very first by the insistence with which Mauriac devotes himself to describing a precise milieu, a corner of land one can point to on a map of France. The action of his novels nearly always…

Presentation Speech by Anders Österling, Member of the Nobel Committee of the , on December 10, 1932 When we survey John Galsworthy’s authorship, it seems to develop unusually smoothly, pushed on by a conscientious and indefatigable creative impulse. Yet he is not one of those who have turned to the literary career rapidly and without…