15 October 1986 has decided to award the 1986 Nobel Prize in chemistry jointly to Professor Dudley R. Herschbach, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA, Professor Yuan T. Lee, University of California, Berkeley, USA and Professor John C. Polanyi, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada for their contributions concerning the dynamics of chemical elementary processes. The dynamics of…

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Swedish Academy The Permanent Secretary Press release October 1986 The Nobel Prize in Literature 1986 Wole Soyinka This year’s Nobel Prize in literature goes to an African writer, Wole Soyinka from Nigeria. Now in his early fifties, he has a large and richly varied literary production behind him and is in his prime as an…

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Presentation Speech by Professor Lars Gyllensten, of the Translation from the Swedish text Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, Wole Soyinka, born in Nigeria in 1934, writes in English and is chiefly recognized as a dramatist. His many-sided and vital literary works also include some important collections of poems and novels, an interesting…

Wole Soyinka was born on 13 July 1934 at Abeokuta, near Ibadan in western Nigeria. After preparatory university studies in 1954 at Government College in Ibadan, he continued at the University of Leeds, where, later, in 1973, he took his doctorate. During the six years spent in England, he was a dramaturgist at the Royal…

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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…