Presentation Speech by Hjalmar Gullberg, Member of the , on December 10, 1945 One day a mother’s tears caused a whole language, disdained at that time in good society, to rediscover its nobility and gain glory through the power of its poetry. It is said that when , the first of the two poets bearing…

Presentation Speech by Anders Österling, Permanent Secretary of the John Steinbeck, the author awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in the little town of Salinas, California, a few miles from the Pacific coast near the fertile Salinas Valley. This locality forms the background for many of his descriptions of the common man’s…

Presentation Speech by Per Hallström, Chairman of the Nobel Committee of the , on December 10, 1926 George Bernard Shaw showed in the novels of his youth the same conception of the world and the same attitude to social problems that he has maintained ever since. This provides a better defence for him than anything…

Presentation Speech by Karl Ragnar Gierow, Permanent Secretary of the Translation from the Swedish text Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, He who attempts to seize in a single grasp the bountiful and very varied authorship of Heinrich Böll finds himself holding an abstraction. Through these writings – begun twenty years ago and culminating in…

  Presentation Speech by Professor Kjell Espmark, of the Translation from the Swedish text Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, When the Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded, for the second time in succession, to a writer from the Spanish-speaking world, it is a reminder of the exceptional literary vitality and richness of…

English Presentation Speech by Professor Horace Engdahl of the , December 10, 2004. Horace Engdahl delivering the Presentation Speech for the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature at the Stockholm Concert Hall. Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, What first perplexes when reading Elfriede Jelinek is the strange, mixed voice that speaks…

Presentation Speech by Anders Österling, Member of the This year’s Nobel Prize for Literature has, as you all know, been awarded to the Russian writer Mikhail Sholokhov, born in 1905, and now in his sixty-first year. Sholokhov’s childhood was spent in the country of the Don Cossacks; and the strong ties that have always bound…

Presentation Speech by Artur Lundkvist, of the Translation from the Swedish text Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, This year’s Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded by the Swedish Academy to the Australian Patrick White. In the – as always – brief citation, mention is made of “his epic and psychological narrative…

Presentation Speech by C.D. af Wirsén, Permanent Secretary of the , on December 10, 1905 Wherever the literature of a people is rich and inexhaustible, the existence of that people is assured, for the flower of civilization cannot grow on barren soil. But in every nation there are some rare geniuses who concentrate in themselves…

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…