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Jazzy's Nobel Laureates by Decade
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Nobel Laureates Challenge, post 2 Nobel Laureates 1901-1910
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? 12. 1911 Maurice Maeterlinck 29 August 1862¨C6 May 1949, aged 86 (Belgian)
Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck , also known as Count (or Comte) Maeterlinck from 1932, was a Belgian playwright, poet, and essayist who was Flemish but wrote in French. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911 "in appreciation of his many-sided literary activities, and especially of his dramatic works, which are distinguished by a wealth of imagination and by a poetic fancy, which reveals, sometimes in the guise of a fairy tale, a deep inspiration, while in a mysterious way they appeal to the readers' own feelings and stimulate their imaginations." The main themes in his work are death and the meaning of life. He was a leading member of La Jeune Belgique group and his plays form an important part of the Symbolist movement.
The Blue Bird: A Fairy Play in Six Acts (1908)
? 13. 1912 Gerhart Hauptmann 15 November 1862-6 June 1946, aged 83 (German)
German dramatist and novelist, Gerhart Johann Robert Hauptmann was born in Obersalzbrunn, Silesia, Kingdom of Prussia (now Szczawno-Zdr¨®j, Poland.) He is counted among the most important promoters of literary naturalism, though he integrated other styles into his work as well. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1912.
Atlantis (1912)
? 14. 1913 Rabindranath Tagore 7 May 1861¨C7 August 1941, aged 80 (Bengali)
Rabindranath Tagore, born Robindronath Thakur, was also known by his pen name Bhanu Singha Thakur (Bhonita), and his sobriquets Gurudev, Kabiguru, and Biswakabi, was a polymath, poet, musician, and artist from the Indian subcontinent. He reshaped Bengali literature and music, as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author of the "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse" of Gitanjali, he became in 1913 the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Tagore's poetic songs were viewed as spiritual and mercurial; however, his "elegant prose and magical poetry" remain largely unknown outside Bengal. He is sometimes referred to as "the Bard of Bengal".
Stories from Tagore (1918)
1914 NO AWARD
? 15. 1915 Romain Rolland 29 January 1866¨C30 December 1944, aged 78 (French)
Romain Rolland was a French dramatist, novelist, essayist, art historian and mystic who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915 "as a tribute to the lofty idealism of his literary production and to the sympathy and love of truth with which he has described different types of human beings". He was a leading supporter of Stalin in France and is also noted for his correspondence with and influence on Sigmund Freud.
Pierre and Luce (1920)
? 16. 1916 Verner von Heidenstam 6 July 1859¨C20 May 1940, aged 80 (Swedish)
Carl Gustaf Verner von Heidenstam was a Swedish poet, novelist and laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1916. He was a member of the Swedish Academy from 1912. His poems and prose work are filled with a great joy of life, sometimes imbued with a love of Swedish history and scenery, particularly its physical aspects.
Sweden's Laureate: Selected Poems Of Verner Von Heidenstam (1919)
? 17. 1917 Karl Gjellerup 2 June 1857 ¨C 11 October 1919, aged 62 (Danish)
Karl Adolph Gjellerup (who occasionally used the pseudonym Epigonos) was a Danish poet and novelist who together with his compatriot Henrik Pontoppidan won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1917. He is associated with the Modern Breakthrough period of Scandinavian literature.
MINNA (1889)
? 18. 1917 Henrik Pontoppidan 24 July 1857¨C21 August 1943, aged 86 (Danish)
Henrik Pontoppidan was a Danish realist writer who shared with Karl Gjellerup the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1917 for "his authentic descriptions of present-day life in Denmark." Pontoppidan's novels and short stories¡ªinformed with a desire for social progress but despairing, later in his life, of its realisation¡ªpresent an unusually comprehensive picture of his country and his epoch. As a writer he was an interesting figure, distancing himself both from the conservative environment in which he was brought up and from his socialist contemporaries and friends. He was the youngest and in many ways the most original and influential member of the Modern Break-Through.
Lucky Per (1898)
1918 NO AWARD
? 19. 1919 Carl Spitteler 24 April 1845¨C29 December 1924, aged 79 (German)
Carl Friedrich Georg Spitteler was a Swiss poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1919 "in special appreciation of his epic, Olympian Spring." His work includes both pessimistic and heroic poems.
Laughing Truths (1905) A collection of essays
? 20. 1920 Knut Hamsun 4 August 1859¨C19 February 1952, aged 79 (Norwegian)
Knut Hamsun was a Norwegian writer whose work spans more than 70 years and shows variation with regard to the subject, perspective and environment, having published more than 20 novels, poetry, short stories, plays, essays, and a travelogue. Considered the leader of the Neo-Romantic revolt at the turn of the 20th century, his later works were influenced by the Norwegian new realism, portraying everyday life in rural Norway. Hamsun was also a pioneer of psychological literature with techniques of stream of consciousness and interior monologue. Isaac Bashevis Singer stated that Hamsun was "the father of the modern school of literature in his every aspect¡ªhis subjectiveness, his fragmentariness, his use of flashbacks, his lyricism. The whole modern school of fiction in the 20th century stems from Hamsun".
Pan (1894)
Nobel Laureates Challenge, post 31901-1920
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? 21. 1921 Anatole France 16 April 1844¨C12 October 1924, aged 80 (French)
Anatole France, born Fran?ois-Anatole Thibault, was a French poet, journalist, and novelist with several best-sellers. Ironic and skeptical, he was considered in his day the ideal French man of letters. He was a member of the Acad¨¦mie fran?aise, and won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his brilliant literary achievements, characterised as they are by a nobility of style, a profound human sympathy, grace, and a true Gallic temperament".
France is also widely believed to be the model for narrator Marcel's literary idol Bergotte in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time.
Penguin Island (1908)
? 22. 1922 Jacinto Benavente 12 August 1866¨C14 July 1954, aged 87 (Spanish)
Jacinto Benavente y Mart¨ªnez was one of the foremost Spanish dramatists of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1922 "for the happy manner in which he has continued the illustrious traditions of the Spanish drama". He is the author of 172 works.
Tres Comedias: Sin querer; De pequenas causas; Los intereses creados (1918)
? 23. 1923 W.B. Yeats 13 June 1865¨C28 January 1939, aged 73 (Irish)
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th-c. literature. A pillar of the Irish literary establishment, he helped found the Abbey Theatre, and in later years served 2 terms as a Senator of the Irish Free State. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival. Yeats was born in Sandymount, Ireland, and educated there and in London. He spent childhood holidays in County Sligo studying poetry from an early age, fascinated by Irish legends and the occult. These topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the 20th c. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and displayed debts to Edmund Spenser, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the poets of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. From 1900, his poetry grew more physical and realistic.
W. B. Yeats: Poems Selected by Seamus Heaney (Poet to Poet: An Essential Choice of Classic Verse)
? 24. 1924 W?adys?aw Stanis?aw Reymont 7 May 1867¨C5 December 1925, aged 58 (Polish)
Born Stanis?aw W?adys?aw Rejment, he later changed the order of his first and middle names and the spelling of his surname. Reymont was a Polish novelist whose literary output includes 30 extensive volumes of prose. His best-known work is the award-winning four-volume novel Ch?opi (The Peasants). In November 1924 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature over rivals Thomas Mann, George Bernard Shaw and Thomas Hardy, after he had been nominated by Anders ?sterling, member of the Swedish Academy. Public opinion in Poland supported the Nobel for Stefan ?eromski, but the prize went to the author of Ch?opi. ?eromski was reportedly refused for his allegedly anti-German sentiments. However, Reymont could not take part in the award ceremony in Sweden due to a heart illness. The award and the check for 116,718 Swedish kronor were sent to Reymont in France, where he was being treated. In 1925, somewhat recovered, he went to a farmers' meeting in Wierzchos?awice near Krak¨®w, where Wincenty Witos welcomed him as a member of PSL "Piast" (the Polish People's Party) and praised his writing skills. Soon after that event, Reymont's health deteriorated. He died in Warsaw in December 1925 and was buried in the Pow?zki Cemetery. The urn holding his heart was laid in a pillar of the Holy Cross Church in Warsaw.
The Comedienne (1920)
? 25. 1925 George Bernard Shaw 26 July 1856¨C2 November 1950, aged 94 (Irish)
George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist. His influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond. Shaw wrote more than 60 plays with a range incorporating both contemporary satire and historical allegory, and was the leading dramatist of his generation, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925. Shaw's expressed views were often contentious; he promoted eugenics and alphabet reform, and opposed vaccination and organised religion. He courted unpopularity by denouncing both sides in the Great War as equally culpable, and although not a republican, castigated British policy on Ireland in the postwar period. These stances had no lasting effect on his standing or productivity as a dramatist; the inter-war years saw a series of often ambitious plays, which achieved varying degrees of popular success. In 1938 he provided the screenplay for a filmed version of Pygmalion for which he received an Academy Award. His appetite for politics and controversy remained undiminished; by the late 1920s he had largely renounced Fabian Society gradualism and often wrote and spoke favourably of dictatorships of the right and left¡ªhe expressed admiration for both Mussolini and Stalin. In the final decade of his life he made fewer public statements, but continued to write prolifically until shortly before his death, having refused all state honours, including the Order of Merit in 1946.
Since Shaw's death, scholarly and critical opinion about his works has varied, but he has regularly been rated among British dramatists as second only to Shakespeare; analysts recognise his extensive influence on generations of English-language playwrights. The word Shavian has entered the language as encapsulating Shaw's ideas and his means of expressing them.
Widower's Houses (1898)
? 26. 1926 Grazia Deledda 27 September 1871¨C15 August 1936, aged 64 (Italian)
Grazia Maria Cosima Damiana Deledda received the Nobel Prize in 1926 in Literature after she had been nominated by Henrik Sch¨¹ck, member of the Swedish Academy "for her idealistically inspired writings which with plastic clarity picture the life on her native island [i.e. Sardinia] and with depth and sympathy deal with human problems in general". She was the first Italian woman to receive the prize. Her response in winning the prize was "Gi¨¤!" ("Already!") The first novel she wrote and published was Fiori di Sardegna (Flowers of Sardinia) in 1892. Her family was not supportive of her desire to write. Deledda's works seemed to focus on portraying harsh realities and difficult lifestyles, combining imaginary and autobiographical elements. Her novels tend to criticise social values and moral norms rather than the people who are victims of such circumstances. A very prolific writer, Deledda published, on average, a novel a year.
After the Divorce (1902)
? 27. 1927 Henri Bergson 18 October 1859¨C4 January 1941, aged 81 (French-Jewish)
Henri-Louis Bergson was a French-Jewish philosopher who was influential in the tradition of continental philosophy, especially during the first half of the 20th century until the Second World War. Bergson is known for his arguments that processes of immediate experience and intuition are more significant than abstract rationalism and science for understanding reality. He was awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his rich and vitalising ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented". In 1930 France awarded him its highest honour, the Grand-Croix de la Legion d'honneur. Bergson's great popularity created a controversy in France where his views were seen as opposing the secular and scientific attitude adopted by the Republic's officials.
An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903)
? 28. 1928 Sigrid Undset 20 May 1882¨C10 June 1949, aged 67 (Norwegian)
Sigrid Undset was a Norwegian novelist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928. Born in Kalundborg, Denmark, her family moved to Norway when she was 2 years old. Undset made her literary debut at the age of 25 with a short realistic novel on adultery. It created a stir, and she found herself ranked as a promising young author in Norway. Undset's books sold well from the start, and, after the publication of her 3rd book, she began to live on her income as a writer. At the end of the 1930s, she commenced work on a new historical novel set in 18th century Scandinavia. Only the first volume, Madame Dorthea, was published, in 1939. WWII broke out that same year and she never completed her new novel. When Joseph Stalin's invasion of Finland touched off the Winter War, on 25 January 1940 Undset supported the Finnish war effort by donating her Nobel Prize. When Germany invaded Norway in April 1940, Undset was forced to flee to Sweden and in 1940 she went to the USA, where she untiringly pleaded her occupied country's cause and that of Europe's Jews in writings, speeches and interviews. Undset returned to Norway after the liberation in 1945. She lived another 4 years, but never published another word.
Jenny (1911)
? 29. 1929 Thomas Mann 6 June 1875¨C12 August 1955, aged 80 (German)
Paul Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate. His highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas are noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. His analysis and critique of the European and German soul used modernised versions of German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer. Mann was a member of the Hanseatic Mann family and portrayed his family and class in his first novel, Buddenbrooks. His older brother was the radical writer Heinrich Mann and three of Mann's six children, Erika Mann, Klaus Mann and Golo Mann, also became significant German writers. When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Mann fled to Switzerland. When World War II broke out in 1939, he moved to the United States, then returned to Switzerland in 1952. Mann is one of the best-known exponents of the so-called Exilliteratur, German literature written in exile by those who opposed the Hitler regime.
Bashan and I (1918)
? 30. 1930 Sinclair Lewis 7 February 1885¨C10 January 1951, aged 65 (American)
Harry Sinclair Lewis was an American novelist, short-story writer and playwright. In 1930, he became the first writer from the United States to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was awarded "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humour, new types of characters." His works are known for their critical views of American capitalism and materialism between the wars. He is also respected for his strong characterisations of modern working women.
The Innocents: A Story for Lovers (1917)
Nobel Laureates Challenge, post 41901-1930
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? 31. 1931 Erik Axel Karlfeldt 20 July 1864¨C8 April 1931, aged 66 (Swedish)
Erik Axel Karlfeldt was a Swedish poet whose highly symbolist poetry masquerading as regionalism was popular and won him the Nobel Prize in Literature posthumously in 1931 after he had been nominated by Nathan S?derblom, member of the Swedish Academy. It has been rumoured that he had been offered, but declined, the award already in 1919. Karlfeldt was born into a farmer's family in Karlbo, in the province of Dalarna. Initially, his name was Erik Axel Eriksson, but he assumed his new name in 1889, wanting to distance himself from his father, who had suffered the disgrace of a criminal conviction. He studied at Uppsala University, simultaneously supporting himself by teaching school in several places, including Djursholms samskola in the Stockholm suburb of Djursholm and at a school for adults. After completing his studies, he held a position at the Royal Library of Sweden, in Stockholm, for five years. In 1904 Karlfeldt was elected a member of the Swedish Academy and held chair number 11. In 1905 he was elected a member of the Nobel Institute of the Academy, and, in 1907, of the Nobel Committee. In 1912 he was elected permanent secretary of the Academy, a position he held until his death. Uppsala University, Karlfeldt's alma mater, awarded him the title of Doctor honoris causae in 1917.
Flora och Pomona (1906)
? 32. 1932 John Galsworthy 14 August 1867¨C31 January 1933, aged 65 (English)
John Galsworthy OM was an English novelist and playwright. From the Four Winds, a collection of short stories, was Galsworthy's first published work in 1897. These and several subsequent works were published under the pen name of John Sinjohn, and it was not until The Island Pharisees (1904) that he began publishing under his own name, probably owing to the recent death of his father. Through his writings Galsworthy campaigned for a variety of causes, including prison reform, women's rights, and animal welfare, and also against censorship. He is now far better known for his novels, particularly The Forsyte Saga, his trilogy about the eponymous family and connected lives. These books, as with many of his other works, deal with social class, and upper-middle class lives in particular. Although sympathetic to his characters, he highlights their insular, snobbish, and acquisitive attitudes and their suffocating moral codes. He is viewed as one of the first writers of the Edwardian era who challenged some of the ideals of society depicted in the preceding literature of Victorian England. Galsworthy was a supporter of British involvement in the First World War. In an article for The Daily News on 31 August 1914 Galsworthy called for war on Germany to protect Belgium. Galsworthy added "What are we going to do for Belgium ¡ª for this most gallant of little countries, ground, because of sheer loyalty, under an iron heel?" During the Great War he worked in a hospital in France as an orderly, after being passed over for military service, and in 1917 turned down a knighthood, for which he was nominated by Prime Minister David Lloyd George, on the precept that a writer's reward comes simply from writing itself. Galsworthy was a humanitarian who took interest in animal welfare, and opposed the slaughter of animals and fought for animal rights. He was also a member of the Humanitarian League. In 1921 he was elected as the first president of the PEN International literary club and was appointed to the Order of Merit in 1929. Galsworthy was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize for Literature, having been nominated that same year by Henrik Sch¨¹ck, a member of the Swedish Academy. He was too ill to attend the Nobel Prize presentation ceremony on 10 December 1932, and died seven weeks later.
The Apple Tree (1916)
? 33. 1933 Ivan Bunin 22 October [O.S. 10 October] 1870¨C8 November 1953, aged 83 (Russian)
Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin was the first Russian writer awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was noted for the strict artistry with which he carried on the classical Russian traditions in the writing of prose and poetry. The texture of his poems and stories, sometimes referred to as "Bunin brocade", is considered to be one of the richest in the language. Best known for his short novels The Village (1910) and Dry Valley (1912), his autobiographical novel The Life of Arseniev (1933, 1939), the book of short stories Dark Avenues (1946) and his 1917¨C1918 diary (Cursed Days, 1926), Bunin was a revered figure among anti-communist white emigres, European critics, and many of his fellow writers, who viewed him as a true heir to the tradition of realism in Russian literature established by Tolstoy and Chekhov. In the 1950s, Bunin became the first of the Russian writers in exile to be published officially in the USSR. In 1965, The Complete Bunin came out in Moscow in nine volumes. Some of his more controversial books, notably Cursed Days, remained banned in the Soviet Union until the late 1980s.
Kasimir Stanislavovitch (1922)
? 34. 1934 Luigi Pirandello 28 June 1867¨C10 December 1936, aged 69 (Italian)
Luigi Pirandello was an Italian dramatist, novelist, poet and short story writer. Awarded the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature for his "bold and brilliant renovation of the drama and the stage", he was the last Italian playwright to be chosen for the award until 9 October 1997. Pirandello's works include novels, hundreds of short stories, and about 40 plays, some of which are written in Sicilian. Pirandello's tragic farces are often seen as forerunners for Theatre of the Absurd.
Six Characters Looking For An Author (1921)
1935 NO AWARD
? 35. 1936 Eugene O'Neill 16 October 1888¨C27 November 1953, aged 65 (American)
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was an American playwright. During the 1910s O'Neill was a regular on the Greenwich Village literary scene, where he also befriended many radicals, most notably Communist Labor Party of America founder John Reed. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into U.S. drama techniques of realism earlier associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish playwright August Strindberg. After his experience in 1912¨C13 at a sanatorium where he was recovering from tuberculosis, he decided to devote himself full-time to writing plays. The events immediately prior to going to the sanatorium are dramatised in his masterpiece, Long Day's Journey into Night, which is often numbered on the short list of the finest U.S. plays in the 20th century, alongside Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.
Anna Christie (1921)
? 36. 1937 Roger Martin du Gard 23 March 1881¨C22 August 1958, aged 77 (French)
Roger Martin du Gard was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, and in 1906, graduated from the ?cole des Chartes with a thesis on archaeology, and an archivist-paleographer degree, which bring a realism to his works. In 1913, he published the novel Jean Barois, the story of a man deeply divided between Catholicism and humanistic philosophy. After the Great War, which Martin du Gard spent almost entirely in the front lines, he devoted most of his time to the writing of Les Thibault, which not only provides a picture of the years before the war, but details hero¡¯s despair at the outbreak of the fighting. The complete works of Martin du Gard were published in two volumes in 1955.
Jean Barois (1913)
? 37. 1938 Pearl S. Buck 26 June 1892¨C6 March 1973, aged 80 (American, Chinese)
Pearl Sydenstricker Buck (also known by her Chinese name Sai Zhenzhu; Chinese: ÈüÕäÖé) was a writer and novelist. As the daughter of missionaries, Buck spent most of her life before 1934 in Zhenjiang, China. Her novel The Good Earth was the best-selling fiction book in the USA in 1931 and 1932, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. In 1938, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces." After returning to the USA in 1935, she continued writing prolifically, became a prominent advocate of the rights of women and minority groups, and wrote widely on Chinese and Asian cultures, becoming particularly well known for her efforts on behalf of Asian and mixed-race adoption.
The Good Earth (1931)
? 38. 1939 Frans Emil Sillanp?? 16 September 1888¨C3 June 1964, aged 75 (Finnish)
Frans Eemil Sillanp?? was a pacifist, and in his work he portrayed rural people living united with the land. His 1919 novel Hurskas kurjuus (Meek Heritage) objectively depicted the reasons for Finnish Civil War, but was controversial at the time. In 1931 he won international fame for his novel Nuorena nukkunut (The Maid Silja) In 1939, Sillanp?? was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his deep understanding of his country's peasantry and the exquisite art with which he has portrayed their way of life and their relationship with Nature." Shortly afterward, talks between Finland and the Soviet Union broke down, ushering the start of the Winter War. Sillanp?? donated his golden Nobel medal to be melted for funds to aid the war effort. In 1943 he returned to public life as a bearded old 'Grandpa Sillanp??'. His radio appearances, especially his tradition of talking on Christmas Eve from 1945 to 1963 became very popular. The asteroid 1446 Sillanp??, discovered on January 26, 1938 by the renowned Finnish astronomer and physicist Yrj? V?is?l?, was named after him.
Hurskas kurjuus (1919)
1940 NO AWARD
Nobel Laureates Challenge, post 51901-1940
38/38
7/7
1941 NO AWARD
1942 NO AWARD
1943 NO AWARD
? 39. 1944 Johannes V. Jensen 20 January 1873¨C25 November 1950, aged 77 (Danish)
Johannes Vilhelm Jensen (commonly known as Johannes V. Jensen) was a Danish author, often considered the first great Danish writer of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1944 "for the rare strength and fertility of his poetic imagination with which is combined an intellectual curiosity of wide scope and a bold, freshly creative style". One of his sisters, Thit Jensen, was also a well-known writer and a very vocal, and occasionally controversial, early feminist. He was born in Fars?, a village in North Jutland, Denmark, as the son of a veterinary surgeon and he grew up in a rural environment. While studying medicine at the University of Copenhagen he worked as a writer to fund his studies. After 3 years of studying he chose to devote himself to literature. In 1906 Jensen created his greatest literary achievement: the collection of verses Digte 1906 (i.e. Poems 1906), which introduced the prose poem to Danish literature. He also wrote novels, poetry, a few plays, and many essays, chiefly on anthropology and the philosophy of evolution. He developed his theories of evolution in a cycle of six novels, Den lange rejse (1908¨C22), translated into English as The Long Journey (1923¨C24), which was published in a two-volume edition in 1938. This is often considered his main work in prose, a daring and often impressive attempt to create a Darwinian alternative to the Biblical Genesis myth. Jensen's most popular literary works were all completed before 1920, a year which also marks his initiation of the 'Museumcentre Aars' in the town of Aars in Himmerland. After this he mostly concentrated on ambitious biological and zoological studies in an effort to create an ethical system based upon Darwinian ideas. He also hoped to renew classical poetry, and worked for many years as a free-lance journalist. Johannes V. Jensen Land in Northern Greenland was named in his honour.
Kongens Fald (1900)
? 40. 1945 Gabriela Mistral 7 April 1889¨C10 January 1957, aged 67 (Chilean)
Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, known by her pseudonym Gabriela Mistral, was a Chilean poet-diplomat, educator and humanist. In 1945 she became the first Latin American author to receive a Nobel Prize in Literature, "for her lyric poetry which, inspired by powerful emotions, has made her name a symbol of the idealistic aspirations of the entire Latin American world". Some central themes in her poems are nature, betrayal, love, a mother's love, sorrow and recovery, travel, and Latin American identity as formed from a mixture of Native American and European influences. Her portrait also appears on the 5,000 Chilean peso bank note.
Madwomen: The Locas Mujeres Poems of Gabriela Mistral
? 41. 1946 Hermann Hesse 2 July 1877¨C9 August 1962, aged 85 (German, Swiss)
Hermann Karl Hesse was a German-born poet, novelist, and painter who was granted Swiss citizenship in 1923. His best-known works include Demian, Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, and The Glass Bead Game, each of which explores an individual's search for authenticity, self-knowledge and spirituality. Hesse observed the rise to power of Nazism in Germany with concern. In 1933, Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann made their travels into exile, each aided by Hesse. In this way, Hesse attempted to work against Hitler's suppression of art and literature that protested Nazi ideology. Hesse's third wife was Jewish, and he had publicly expressed his opposition to anti-Semitism long before then. In March 1933, seven weeks after Hitler took power, Hesse wrote to a correspondent in Germany, "It is the duty of spiritual types to stand alongside the spirit and not to sing along when the people start belting out the patriotic songs their leaders have ordered them to sing." In the 1930s, Hesse made a quiet statement of resistance by reviewing and publicising the work of banned Jewish authors, including Franz Kafka. In the late 30s, German journals stopped publishing Hesse's work, and the Nazis eventually banned it. In his time, Hesse was a popular and influential author in the German-speaking world; worldwide fame only came later. Hesse's first great novel, Peter Camenzind, was received enthusiastically by young Germans desiring a different and more "natural" way of life in this time of great economic and technological progress in the country (see also Wandervogel movement). Demian had a strong and enduring influence on the generation returning home from the Great War. Similarly, The Glass Bead Game, with its disciplined intellectual world of Castalia and the powers of meditation and humanity, captivated Germans' longing for a new order amid the chaos of a broken nation following the loss sustained in World War II. As reflected in Demian, and other works, Hesse believed that "for different people, there are different ways to God"; but despite the influence he drew from Indian and Buddhist philosophies, he stated about his parents: ¡°their Christianity, one not preached but lived, was the strongest of the powers that shaped and moulded me".
Demian (1919)
? 42. 1947 Andr¨¦ Gide 22 November 1869¨C19 February 1951, aged 81 (French)
Andr¨¦ Paul Guillaume Gide was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (in 1947). Gide's career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist movement, to the advent of anti-colonialism between the two World Wars. The author of more than fifty books, at the time of his death his obituary in The New York Times described him as "France's greatest contemporary man of letters" and "judged the greatest French writer of this century by the literary cognoscenti." Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide exposes to public view the conflict and eventual reconciliation of the two sides of his personality (characterised by a Protestant austerity and a transgressive sexual adventurousness, respectively), which a strict and moralistic education had helped set at odds. Gide's work can be seen as an investigation of freedom and empowerment in the face of moralistic and puritanical constraints, and centres on his continuous effort to achieve intellectual honesty. His self-exploratory texts reflect his search of how to be fully oneself, including owning one's sexual nature, without at the same time betraying one's values. His political activity is shaped by the same ethos, as indicated by his repudiation of communism after his 1936 voyage to the USSR. Andr¨¦ Gide's writings spanned many genres ¨C as a master of prose narrative, occasional dramatist and translator, literary critic, letter writer, essayist, and diarist, Andr¨¦ Gide provided 20th-century French literature with one of its most intriguing examples of the man of letters.
Oscar Wilde (1910)
? 43. 1948 T.S. Eliot (English)
Thomas Stearns Eliot OM (26 September 1888 ¨C 4 January 1965) was a poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, and literary critic. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, to a prominent Boston Brahmin family, he moved to England in 1914 at the age of 25 and went on to settle, work and marry there. He became a British subject in 1927 at the age of 39, subsequently renouncing his American citizenship. Considered one of the 20th century's major poets, Eliot attracted widespread attention for his poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915), which was seen as a masterpiece of the Modernist movement. It was followed by some of the best-known poems in the English language, including The Waste Land (1922), "The Hollow Men" (1925), "Ash Wednesday" (1930), and Four Quartets (1943). He was also known for his seven plays, particularly Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Cocktail Party (1949). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948, "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry". For a poet of his stature, Eliot produced a relatively small number of poems. He was aware of this even early in his career. He wrote to J.H. Woods, one of his former Harvard professors, "My reputation in London is built upon one small volume of verse, and is kept up by printing two or three more poems in a year. The only thing that matters is that these should be perfect in their kind, so that each should be an event."
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939)
? 44. 1949 William Faulkner 25 September 1897¨C6 July 1962, aged 64 (American)
William Cuthbert Faulkner was a writer and Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner wrote novels, short stories, screenplays, poetry, essays, and a play. He is primarily known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where he spent most of his life. Faulkner is one of the most celebrated writers in American literature generally and Southern literature specifically. Though his work was published as early as 1919 and largely during the 1920s and 1930s, Faulkner's renown reached its peak upon the publication of Malcolm Cowley's The Portable Faulkner and his 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the only Mississippi-born Nobel winner. Two of his works, A Fable (1954) and his last novel The Reivers (1962), each won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked his 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury sixth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century; also on the list were As I Lay Dying (1930) and Light in August (1932). Absalom, Absalom! (1936) appears on similar lists.
A Rose for Emily (1930)
? 45. 1950 Bertrand Russell 18 May 1872¨C2 February 1970, aged 97 (Welsh)
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM FRS was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, writer, essayist, social critic, political activist, and Nobel laureate. At various points in his life, Russell considered himself a liberal, a socialist and a pacifist. Russell was born in Monmouthshire into one of the most prominent aristocratic families in the UK. In the early 1900s, Russell led the British "revolt against idealism". He is considered one of the founders of analytic philosophy along with his predecessor Gottlob Frege, colleague G. E. Moore and prot¨¦g¨¦ Ludwig Wittgenstein. He is widely held to be one premier logicians of the 20th century. His work has had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science and philosophy, especially the philosophy of language, epistemology and metaphysics. Russell was a prominent anti-war activist and he championed anti-imperialism. Occasionally, he advocated preventive nuclear war, before the opportunity provided by the atomic monopoly had passed and he decided he would "welcome with enthusiasm" world government. He went to prison for his pacifism during the Great War. Later, Russell concluded that war against Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany was a necessary "lesser of two evils" and criticised Stalinist totalitarianism, attacked the involvement of the USA in the Vietnam War, and was an outspoken proponent of nuclear disarmament. In 1950, Russell was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought".
Why I Am Not a Christian (1927)
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? 46. 1951 P?r Lagerkvist 23 May 1891¨C11 July 1974, aged 83 (Swedish)
P?r Fabian Lagerkvist was a Swedish author who wrote poems, plays, novels, stories, and essays of considerable expressive power and influence from his early 20s to his late 70s. One of his central themes was the fundamental question of good and evil, which he examined through such figures as Barabbas, the man who was freed instead of Jesus, and Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew. As a moralist, he used religious motifs and figures from the Christian tradition without following the doctrines of the church. Lagerkvist was born in V?xj? (Sm?land). He received a traditional religious education ¨C he would later say, with little exaggeration, that he "had had the good fortune to grow up in a home where the only books known were the Bible and the Book of Hymns". In his teens he broke away from Christian beliefs, but, unlike many other writers and thinkers in his generation, he did not become vehemently critical of religious beliefs as such. Though he was politically a socialist for most of his life, he never indulged in the idea that "religion is the opium of the people".
The Marriage Feast And Other Stories (1915)
? 47. 1952 Fran?ois Mauriac 11 October 1885¨C1 September 1970, aged 84 (French)
Fran?ois Charles Mauriac was a novelist, dramatist, critic, poet, journalist, and lifelong Catholic. He studied literature at the University of Bordeaux, graduating in 1905, then moved to Paris to study at the ?cole des Chartes. In 1933 he was elected to the Acad¨¦mie fran?aise. Mauriac criticised the Catholic Church for its support of Franco and joined the Resistance as early as December 1941. He had a bitter dispute with Albert Camus immediately following the Liberation of France. Camus said all Nazi collaborators should be purged, but Mauriac lent towards reconciliation. Despite having been viciously criticised by Robert Brasillach he campaigned against his execution. He also had a bitter public dispute with Roger Peyrefitte, who criticised the Vatican. Mauriac was opposed to French rule in Vietnam, and strongly condemned the use of torture by the French army. In 1952 he won the Nobel Prize "for the deep spiritual insight and the artistic intensity with which he has in his novels penetrated the drama of human life", and in 1958 he was awarded the Grand Cross of the L¨¦gion d'honneur.
Proust's Way (1950)
? 48. 1953 Winston Churchill 30 November 1874¨C24 January 1965, aged 90 (English)
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill was an artist, historian, army officer, writer, and politician - twice the Prime Minister of the UK. Born in Oxfordshire to a wealthy, aristocratic family, Churchill joined the British Army in 1895, gaining fame as a war correspondent and writing books about his campaigns. Elected MP in 1900 as a Conservative, he became a Liberal in 1904. Churchill served as President of the Board of Trade, Home Secretary, and First Lord of the Admiralty, championing prison reform and workers' social security. In WWI he resigned from government to serve on the Western Front, returning to government in 1917. In the 1930s, Churchill called for British rearmament to counter the growing threat from Nazi Germany. At the outbreak of WWII he was re-appointed First Lord of the Admiralty, and was Prime Minister from 1940-1945. He was re-elected in 1951 and resigned in 1955, but remained an MP until 1964. He died in 1965 and was given a state funeral. Churchill was widely considered one of the 20th century's most significant figures as a victorious wartime leader, social reformer, and accomplished writer.
A Traveller in War-Time: With an Essay on the American Contribution and the Democratic Idea (1918)
? 49. 1954 Ernest Hemingway July 21, 1899 ¨C July 2, 1961, aged 61 (American)
Ernest Miller Hemingway was a journalist, novelist, short-story writer, and sportsman. His economical and understated style¡ªwhich he termed the iceberg theory¡ªhad a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his adventurous lifestyle and his public image brought him admiration from later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between 1920-1950, and he won the Nobel Prize in 1954. He published 7 novels, 6 short-story collections, and 2 nonfiction works - many published posthumously. Following high school, he was a reporter before enlisting on the Italian Front as an ambulance driver in WWI. His wartime experiences formed the basis for his novel A Farewell to Arms (1929). In 1921 Hemingway moved to Paris where he worked as a foreign correspondent and was one of the "Lost Generation." His debut novel The Sun Also Rises was published in 1926. Hemingway was a journalist at the Normandy landings and the liberation of Paris. He had homes in Florida and Cuba. He bought a house in Idaho, and it was there he took his own life. The Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and the Hemingway Award were established in his honour to recognise significant achievement in arts and culture.
The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1936)
? 50. 1955 Halld¨®r Laxness 23 April 1902¨C8 February 1998, aged 95 (Icelandic)
Halld¨®r Kiljan Laxness wrote novels, poetry, articles, essays, plays, travelogues, and short stories. Born as Halld¨®r Gu?j¨®nsson in Reykjav¨ªk, his family moved to Mosfellssveit when he was 3. Halld¨®r read and wrote stories from an early age, and published his first novel in 1919. Laxness lived in the USA from 1927-29, and stated that he "did not become a socialist in America from studying manuals of socialism but from watching the starving unemployed in the parks." Following a critical article of America which resulted in being charged, detained, and forfeiting his passport, he returned to Iceland once the charges were dropped. Laxness was awarded the Lenin Peach Prize, the World Peace Council Prize, and the Nobel Prize "for his vivid epic power, which has renewed the great narrative art of Iceland".
World Light (1937)
? 51. 1956 Juan Ram¨®n Jim¨¦nez 23 December 1881¨C29 May 1958, aged 76 (Spanish)
Juan Ram¨®n Jim¨¦nez Mantec¨®n was a prolific poet and writer. In 1900 he published his first 2 books, aged 18. The death of his father the same year exacerbated his depression from which he suffered the rest of his life, often with re-occurring bouts of hospitalisation. His poetic output during his life was immense. Many of his poems dealt with music and colour, which he at times compared to love and lust. At the start of the Spanish Civil War, he and his wife went into exile in Puerto Rico, settling there in 1946. Jim¨¦nez received the Nobel Prize "for his lyrical poetry, which in the Spanish language constitutes an example of high spirit and artistical purity." Two days later his wife died of ovarian cancer. He never recovered emotionally, and 2 years later died later in the same clinic. A quotation from Jim¨¦nez, "If they give you ruled paper, write the other way," is the epigraph to Ray Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451.
Selected Writings of Juan Ramon Jimenez (1957)
? 52. 1957 Albert Camus 7 November 1913¨C4 January 1960, aged 46 (French Algerian)
Albert Camus was a philosopher, author, and journalist. He won the Nobel Prize aged 44 - the 2nd-youngest recipient in history. Born in Algeria, he grew up in a poor neighbourhood, then studied philosophy at the University of Algiers. Camus was in Paris during WWII and joined the French Resistance where he served as editor-in-chief on an outlawed newspaper. After the war, he was a celebrity figure and gave many lectures around the world. Camus opposed the Soviet Union because of its totalitarianism, and campaigned for European integration. Camus contributed to the rise of the philosophy known as absurdism. He died in a car crash, and it has been speculated Camus was assassinated by the KGB because of his criticism of Soviet abuses.
The Plague (1947)
? 53. 1958 Boris Pasternak 10 February [O.S. 29 January] 1890¨C30 May 1960 (Russian)
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (§¢§à§â§Ú?§ã §§Ö§à§ß§Ú?§Õ§à§Ó§Ú§é §±§Ñ§ã§ä§Ö§â§ß§Ñ?§Ü) was poet, novelist, and literary translator. Composed in 1917, Pasternak's first book of poems, My Sister, Life, was published in Berlin in 1922 and soon became an important collection in the Russian language. Pasternak's translations of stage plays by Goethe, Schiller, Calder¨®n de la Barca and Shakespeare remain very popular with Russian audiences. Pasternak is also known as the author of Doctor Zhivago (1957), a novel that takes place between the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the Second World War. Doctor Zhivago was rejected for publication in the USSR, but the manuscript was smuggled to Italy for publication. Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, an event that enraged the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which forced him to decline the prize, though his descendants were able to accept it in his name in 1988. Doctor Zhivago has been part of the main Russian school curriculum since 2003.
Doctor Zhivago (1957)
? 54. 1959 Salvatore Quasimodo 20 August 1901¨C14 June 1968 (Sicilian)
Salvatore Quasimodo was a Sicilian novelist and poet. He was awarded the Nobel Prize "for his lyrical poetry, which with classical fire expresses the tragic experience of life in our own times". Along with Giuseppe Ungaretti and Eugenio Montale, he is one of the foremost Italian poets of the 20th century. Traditional literary critique divides Quasimodo's work into two major periods: the hermetic period until World War II and the post-hermetic era until his death. Although these periods are distinct, they are to be seen as a single poetical quest. This quest or exploration for a unique language took him through various stages and various modalities of expression. As an intelligent and clever poet, Quasimodo used a hermetical, "closed" language to sketch recurring motifs like Sicily, religion and death. Subsequently, the translation of authors from Roman and Greek Antiquity enabled him to extend his linguistic toolkit. The disgust and sense of absurdity of World War II also had its impact on the poet's language. This bitterness, however, faded in his late writings, and was replaced by the mature voice of an old poet reflecting upon his world.
Selected Poems (1965)
? 55. 1960 Saint-John Perse 31 May 1887¨C20 September 1975, aged 88 (French)
Saint-John Perse (a pseudonym of Alexis Leger) was a French poet-diplomat, awarded the Nobel Prize "for the soaring flight and evocative imagery of his poetry." He was a major French diplomat from 1914 to 1940, after which he lived primarily in the United States until 1967. Alexis Leger was born in Pointe-¨¤-Pitre, Guadeloupe. The young Alexis felt like an expat, spending his time hiking, fencing, riding horses, and sailing the Atlantic. He passed the baccalaur¨¦at with honours, and published his first book of poetry, ?loges, in 1911. Due to his political beliefs, the Vichy government dismissed him from the L¨¦gion d'honneur order and revoked his French citizenship in 1940, and reinstating it after the war. A few months before he died, Leger donated his library, manuscripts and private papers to Fondation Saint-John Perse, a research centre devoted to his life and work.
Selected Poems
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? 56. 1961 Ivo Andri? 9 October 1892¨C13 March 1975, aged 83 (Yugoslav, Bosnian)
Ivo Andri? (§ª§Ó§à §¡§ß§Õ§â§Ú?); born Ivan Andri?, was a Yugoslav writer, diplomat, politician, novelist, poet and short story writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1961. His writings dealt mainly with life in his native Bosnia under Ottoman rule. Though of Croat origin, Andri? came to identify as a Serb upon moving to Belgrade. Above all, he is renowned for his contributions to Serbian literature. As a youth, he wrote in his native Ijekavian dialect, but switched to Serbia's Ekavian dialect while living in the Yugoslav capital. The Nobel Committee lists him as a Yugoslav and identifies the language he used as Serbo-Croatian. In Croatia, his works were long shunned for nationalist reasons, and even briefly blacklisted following Yugoslavia's dissolution, but were rehabilitated by the literary community at the start of the 21st century. He is highly regarded in Serbia for his contributions to Serbian literature.
The Bridge on the Drina (1945)
? 57. 1962 John Steinbeck 27 February 27 1902¨C20 December 1968, aged 66 (American)
John Ernst Steinbeck Jr. won the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception." During his writing career, he authored 33 books. The Pulitzer Prize-winning The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is considered Steinbeck's masterpiece and part of the American literary canon. Most of Steinbeck's work is set in central California, particularly in the Salinas Valley and the California Coast Ranges region. His works frequently explored the themes of fate and injustice, especially as applied to downtrodden or everyman protagonists.
The Red Pony (1933)
? 58. 1963 George Seferis 13 March [O.S. 29 February] 1900¨C20 September 1971, aged 71 (Greek)
Giorgos or George Seferis (¦£¦É?¦Ñ¦Ã¦Ï? ¦²¦Å¦Õ?¦Ñ¦Ç?), is the pen name of Georgios Seferiades (¦£¦Å?¦Ñ¦Ã¦É¦Ï? ¦²¦Å¦Õ¦Å¦Ñ¦É?¦Ä¦Ç?) was one of the most important Greek poets of the 20th c., as well as a Nobel laureate. Seferis was a career diplomat in the Greek Foreign Service, culminating in his appointment as Ambassador to the UK, a post which he held from 1957 to 1962. Awarded the 1963 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his eminent lyrical writing, inspired by a deep feeling for the Hellenic world of culture," Seferis was the first Greek to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
George Seferis: Collected Poems, 1924-1955. Bilingual Edition
? 59. 1964 Jean-Paul Sartre 21 June 1905¨C15 April 1980, aged 74 (French)
Philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was one of the leading figures in 20th-c. French philosophy and Marxism, as well as one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism and phenomenology. His work has influenced sociology, critical theory, post-colonial theory, literary studies, and continues to influence these disciplines. Noted for his open relationship with prominent feminist and fellow existentialist philosopher and writer Simone de Beauvoir, and the pair challenged cultural and social assumptions and expectations of their upbringings, which they considered bourgeois, in both lifestyle and thought. The conflict between oppressive, spiritually destructive conformity and an 'authentic' way of 'being' became the dominant theme of Sartre's early work, embodied in his principal philosophical work Being and Nothingness. Sartre was awarded the Nobel despite attempting to refuse it, saying that he always declined official honours and that "a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution".
No Exit (1944)
? 60. 1965 Mikhail Sholokhov 24 May [O.S. 11 May] 1905¨C21 February 1984, aged 78 (Russian)
Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov (Russian: §®§Ú§ç§Ñ§Ú§Ý §¡§Ý§Ö§Ü§ã§Ñ§ß§Õ§â§à§Ó§Ú§é §º§à§Ý§à§ç§à§Ó) was a Soviet-Russian novelist and winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is known for writing about life and fate of Don Cossacks during the Russian Revolution, the civil war and the period of collectivisation, primarily in his most famous novel, And Quiet Flows the Don - a volume of stories largely based on his personal experiences in his native region during World War I and the Russian Civil War.
And Quiet Flows the Don (1934)
? 61. 1966 S.Y. Agnon 17 July 1888¨C 17 February 1970, aged 81 (Israeli - Jewish)
Shmuel Yosef Agnon (Hebrew: ????? ???? ?????) was a Nobel Prize laureate writer and was one of the central figures of modern Hebrew fiction. In Hebrew, he is known by the acronym Shai Agnon (?"? ?????). In English, his works are published as S. Y. Agnon. Agnon was born Shmuel Yosef Halevi Czaczkes in Polish Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and later immigrated to Mandatory Palestine, and died in Jerusalem, Israel. His works deal with the conflict between traditional Jewish life and the modern world, also attempting to recapture the fading traditions of the European shtetl. Agnon shared the 1966 Nobel Prize with the poet Nelly Sachs.
In Mr. Lublin's Store (1997)
? 62. 1966 Nelly Sachs 10 December 1891¨C12 May 1970, aged 78 (German, Swedish - Jewish)
Nelly Sachs was a poet and playwright. Her experiences resulting from the rise of the Nazis in WWII Europe transformed her into a poignant spokesperson for the grief and yearnings of her fellow Jewish people. When, with Shmuel Yosef Agnon, she was awarded the Nobel Prize, she observed that Agnon represented Israel whereas "I represent the tragedy of the Jewish people."
O the Chimneys: Selected Poems (1967)
? 63. 1967 Miguel ?ngel Asturias 19 October 1899-9 June 1974, aged 74 (Guatemalan)
Miguel ?ngel Asturias Rosales was a poet-diplomat, novelist, playwright and journalist. Asturias helped establish Latin American literature's contribution to mainstream Western culture, and at the same time drew attention to the importance of indigenous cultures, especially those of his native Guatemala. Asturias was greatly inspired by the Maya culture of Central America. It is an overarching theme in many of his works and greatly influenced the style of this writing. After his death in 1974, his home country acknowledged his contribution to Guatemalan literature by establishing literary awards and scholarships in his name. One of these is the country's most distinguished literary prize, the Miguel ?ngel Asturias National Prize in Literature. In addition, Guatemala City's national theatre, the Centro Cultural Miguel ?ngel Asturias, is named after him. Asturias is remembered as a man who believed strongly in recognising indigenous culture in Guatemala. He is credited with initiating Latin American modernism, and his experimentation with style and language is considered a precursor to the magical realism genre.
El Se?or Presidente (1946)
? 64. 1968 Yasunari Kawabata 11 June 1899¨C16 April 1972, aged 72 (Japanese)
Yasunari Kawabata (´¨¶Ë ¿µ³É, Kawabata Yasunari) was a Japanese novelist and short story writer whose spare, lyrical, subtly-shaded prose works won him the Nobel Prize, the first Japanese person to receive such a distinction. In awarding the prize "for his narrative mastery, which with great sensibility expresses the essence of the Japanese mind", the Nobel Committee cited three of his novels, Snow Country, Thousand Cranes, and The Old Capital. In addition to fiction writing, Kawabata also worked as a reporter, most notably for the Mainichi Shimbun. Although he refused to participate in the militaristic fervour that accompanied WWII, he also demonstrated little interest in postwar political reforms. Along with the death of all his family members while he was young, Kawabata suggested that the war was one of the greatest influences on his work, stating he would be able to write only elegies in postwar Japan. Still, many commentators detect little thematic change between Kawabata's prewar and postwar writings. The book that he himself considered his finest work, The Master of Go (1951), contrasts sharply with his other works. It is a semi-fictional recounting of a major Go match in 1938, on which Kawabata had actually reported for the Mainichi newspaper chain. Although the novel is moving on the surface as a retelling of a climactic struggle, some readers consider it a symbolic parallel to the defeat of Japan in WWII.
The Master of Go (1954)
? 65. 1969 Samuel Beckett 13 April 1906¨C22 December 1989, aged 83 (Irish, French)
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish novelist, playwright, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator. A resident of Paris for most of his adult life, he wrote in both French and English. As a courier for the French Resistance, Beckett was nearly caught by the gestapo on a number of occasions. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human existence, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour, and became increasingly minimalist in his later career. He is considered one of the last modernist writers, and one of the key figures in what Martin Esslin called the "Theatre of the Absurd". His most well known work is his 1953 play Waiting for Godot. Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize "for his writing, which¡ªin new forms for the novel and drama¡ªin the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation."
First Love and Other Novellas (1945)
? 66. 1970 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, aged 89 (Soviet, Russian)
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (11 December 1918 ¨C 3 August 2008) was a Russian novelist, philosopher, historian, short story writer and political prisoner. Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of the Soviet Union and Communism and helped to raise global awareness of its Gulag labour camp system. After serving in the Soviet Army during WWII, he was sentenced to spend 8 years in a labour camp and then internal exile for criticising Josef Stalin in a private letter. He was allowed to publish only one work in the Soviet Union, the novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962). Although the reforms brought by Nikita Khrushchev freed him from exile in 1956, the publication of Cancer Ward (1968), August 1914 (1971), and The Gulag Archipelago (1973) angered authorities, and Solzhenitsyn lost his Soviet citizenship in 1974. He was flown to West Germany, and in 1976 he moved with his family to the USA, where he continued to write. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, his citizenship was restored in 1990, and 4 years later he returned to Russia, where he remained until his death in 2008. He was awarded the Nobel Prize "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature". His The Gulag Archipelago was a highly influential work that "amounted to a head-on challenge to the Soviet state" and sold tens of millions of copies.
The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Volume 1 (1973)
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? 67. 1971 Pablo Neruda 12 July 1904¨C23 September 1973, aged 69 (Chilean)
Ricardo Eli¨¦cer Neftal¨ª Reyes Basoalto, better known by his pen name and, later, legal name Pablo Neruda, was a Chilean poet-diplomat and politician and is considered the national poet of Chile. Neruda became known as a poet aged 13, and wrote in a variety of styles, including surrealist poems, historical epics, overtly political manifestos, a prose autobiography, and passionate love poems. He assumed his pen name as a teenager, partly because it was in vogue, partly to hide his poetry from his father, a rigid man who wanted his son to have a "practical" occupation. Neruda's pen name was derived from Czech writer and poet Jan Neruda; Pablo is thought to be a nod to Paul Verlaine. Neruda occupied many diplomatic positions in various countries during his lifetime and served a term as a Senator for the Chilean Communist Party. When President Gabriel Gonz¨¢lez Videla outlawed communism in Chile in 1948, a warrant was issued for Neruda's arrest. Friends hid him for months in the basement of a house in the port city of Valpara¨ªso; Neruda escaped through a mountain pass near Maihue Lake into Argentina. Years later, Neruda was a close advisor to Chile's socialist President Salvador Allende. When Neruda returned to Chile after his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Allende invited him to read at the Estadio Nacional before 70,000 people.
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924)
? 68. 1972 Heinrich B?ll 21 December 1917-16 July 1985, aged 67 (German)
Heinrich Theodor B?ll was one of Germany's foremost post¨CWorld War II writers. B?ll was awarded the Georg B¨¹chner Prize in 1967 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972. Although B?ll refused to join the Hitler Youth during the 1930s, he was conscripted into the Wehrmacht, where he was wounded four times and contracted typhoid before being captured by US Army soldiers in April 1945 and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp. B?ll became a full-time writer at the age of 30, and his first novel was published in 1949. He received many awards and was lauded on a number of occasions. B?ll was President of PEN International, the worldwide association of writers and the oldest human rights organisation, between 1971¨C1973. His work has been translated into more than 30 languages, and he remains one of Germany's most widely read authors.
Billiards at Half-Past Nine (1959)
? 69. 1973 Patrick White 28 May 1912¨C30 September 1990, aged 78 (Australian, English)
Patrick Victor Martindale White was a writer who published 12 novels, 3 short-story collections, and 8 plays, from 1935 to 1987. White's fiction employs humour, florid prose, shifting narrative vantage points and stream of consciousness techniques. He was awarded the Nobel Prize, "for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature", as it says in the Swedish Academy's citation, and the first Australian to have been awarded the prize. White was also the inaugural recipient of the Miles Franklin Award.
The Vivisector (1970)
? 70. 1974 Eyvind Johnson 29 July 1900¨C25 August 1976, aged 76 (Swedish)
Born Olof Edvin Verner Jonsson, writer Eyvind Johnson was regarded as the most groundbreaking novelist in modern Swedish literature. He became a member of the Swedish Academy in 1957 and shared the Nobel Prize in Literature with Harry Martinson in 1974 with the citation: "for a narrative art, far-seeing in lands and ages, in the service of freedom." Johnson was strongly against fascism and nazism. During WWII he was editor of the magazine H?ndslag and published Krilon, a trilogy of novels that in the form of an allegory deals with the events during the war.
Nu var det 1914 (1934)
? 71. 1974 Harry Martinson 6 May 1904¨C11 February 1978, aged 73 (Swedish)
Harry Martinson was an author, poet and former sailor. In 1949 he was elected into the Swedish Academy. He was awarded a joint Nobel Prize together with fellow Swede Eyvind Johnson "for writings that catch the dewdrop and reflect the cosmos". The choice was controversial, as both Martinson and Johnson were members of the academy. At a young age he lost both his parents whereafter he was placed as a foster child. At the age of 16 Martinson signed onto a ship to spend the next few years sailing around the world until lung problems forced him to return to Sweden, where he travelled without steady employment, at times living as a vagabond. At the age of 21, he was arrested for vagrancy. In 1929, he debuted as a poet. His poetry, characterised by linguistic innovation and a frequent use of metaphors, combined an acute eye for, and love of nature, with a deeply felt humanism. He has been called "the great reformer of 20th-century Swedish poetry, the most original of the writers called 'proletarian'."
Aniara: An Epic Science Fiction Poem (1956)
? 72. 1975 Eugenio Montale 12 October 1896-12 September 1981, aged 84 (Italian)
Eugenio Montale was a poet, prose writer, editor and translator, as well as Senator for Life from 1967-1981. Montale wrote more than ten anthologies of short lyrics, a journal of poetry translation, plus several books of prose translations, two books of literary criticism, and one of fantasy prose. Alongside his imaginative work he was a constant contributor to Italy's most important newspaper, the Corriere della Sera, for which he wrote a huge number of articles on literature, music, and art. He also wrote a foreword to Dante's "The Divine Comedy", in which he mentions the credibility of Dante, and his insight and unbiased imagination. In 1925 he was a signatory to the Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals. Montale's own politics inclined toward the liberalism of Piero Gobetti and Benedetto Croce. Montale's work, especially his first poetry collection Ossi di seppia ("Cuttlefish Bones"), which appeared in 1925, shows him as an antifascist who felt detached from contemporary life and found solace and refuge in the solitude of nature.
The Collected Poems of Eugenio Montale: 1925-1977
? 73. 1976 Saul Bellow 10 June 1915¨C5 April 2005, aged 89 (Canadian, American - Jewish)
Saul Bellow (born Solomon Bellows) writer who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times and he received the National Book Foundation's lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990. In the words of the Swedish Nobel Committee, his writing exhibited "the mixture of rich picaresque novel and subtle analysis of our culture, of entertaining adventure, drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation, all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act, or prevent us from acting, and that can be called the dilemma of our age." Bellow was widely regarded as one of the 20th century's greatest authors.
Herzog (1964)
? 74. 1977 Vicente Aleixandre 26 April 1898¨C14 December 1984, aged 86 (Spanish)
Vicente P¨ªo Marcelino Cirilo Aleixandre y Merlo was a poet who was born in Seville. He received the Nobel Prize "for a creative poetic writing which illuminates man's condition in the cosmos and in present-day society, at the same time representing the great renewal of the traditions of Spanish poetry between the wars", and was part of the Generation of '27. Aleixandre's early poetry, written mostly in free verse, is highly surrealistic, praising the beauty of nature by using symbols to represent the earth and sea. Many of Aleixandre's early poems are filled with sadness, reflecting his feeling that people have lost the passion and free spirit that he saw in nature. He was one of the greatest poets of Spanish literature alongside Cernuda and Lorca. The melancholia of his poetry was also the melancholy of failed or ephemeral love affairs. Aleixandre's bisexuality was well known to his circle of friends, but he never admitted it publicly, although he had a long-term love relationship with the poet Carlos Bouso?o.
A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems of Vicente Aleixandre
? 75. 1978 Isaac Bashevis Singer 21 November 1902¨C24 July 1991, aged 88 (Polish, American - Jewish)
Born in Poland in 1902, and emigrated to the USA in 1935, Isaac Bashevis Singer was a writer and journalist of three nations: Jewish (he wrote in Yiddish), Polish, and American. He was born in Leoncin near Warsaw, and died in Miami, Florida. Singer learnt Polish in order to be able to read the works of Mickiewicz and S?owacki. However, he was never a fluent Polish speaker. As a teenager he wrote his first poem in Hebrew.
Enemies: A Love Story (1966)
? 76. 1979 Odysseus Elytis 2 November 1911¨C18 March 1996, aged 84 (Greek)
Odysseus Elytis, pen name of Odysseus Alepoudellis, was a major exponent of romantic modernism in Greece and the world. Elytis was born in Heraklion on the island of Crete. His family later moved to Athens, where he graduated from high school and later attended law school at University of Athens. In 1935 Elytis published his first poem in the journal New Letters at the prompting of such friends as George Seferis. His entry with a distinctively earthy and original form assisted to inaugurate a new era in Greek poetry and its subsequent reform after WWII. From 1969-1972, Elytis exiled himself to Paris. He was romantically linked to the lyricist and musicologist Mariannina Kriezi. Elytis was intensely private and vehemently solitary in pursuing his ideals of poetic truth and experience and his poetry has marked a broad spectrum of subject matter and stylistic touch with an emphasis on the expression both rarefied and passionate.
The Collected Poems of Odysseus Elytis
? 77. 1980 Czes?aw Mi?osz (Lithuanian, Polish, American)
Czes?aw Mi?osz was a poet, prose writer, translator, and diplomat. Regarded as one of the great poets of the 20th century. In his Nobel citation, the Swedish Academy called Mi?osz a writer who "voices man's exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts". Mi?osz survived the German occupation of Warsaw during WWII and became a cultural attach¨¦ for the Polish government during the postwar period. When communist authorities threatened his safety, he defected to France and ultimately chose exile in the USA, where he became a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His poetry¡ªparticularly about his wartime experience¡ªand his appraisal of Stalinism in a prose book, The Captive Mind, brought him renown as a leading ¨¦migr¨¦ artist and intellectual. Throughout his life and work, Mi?osz tackled questions of morality, politics, history, and faith. As a translator, he introduced Western works to a Polish audience, and as a scholar and editor, he championed a greater awareness of Slavic literature in the West.
The Collected Poems of Czes?aw Mi?osz 1931-1987
Nobel Laureates Challenge, post 91901-1980
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? 78. 1981 Elias Canetti 25 July 1905¨C14 August 1994, aged 89 (Bulgarian, English, Viennese, Swiss - Jewish)
Elias Canetti was a German-language author, born in Ruse, Bulgaria to a merchant family. They moved to Manchester, England, but his father died in 1912, and his mother took her three sons back to the continent. They settled in Vienna. Canetti moved to England in 1938 after the Anschluss to escape Nazi persecution. He became a British citizen in 1952. He is known as a modernist novelist, playwright, memoirist, and non-fiction writer. He won the Nobel Prize "for writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas and artistic power". He published two works in Vienna before escaping to Great Britain which reflected the experiences of Nazi Germany and political chaos in his works, especially exploring mob action and group thinking in his novel Die Blendung (Auto-da-F¨¦, 1935) and non-fiction Crowds and Power (1960). He wrote several volumes of memoirs, contemplating the influence of his multi-lingual background and childhood. Despite being a German-language writer, Canetti settled in Britain until the 1970s, receiving British citizenship in 1952. For his last 20 years, Canetti lived mostly in Z¨¹rich.
Crowds and Power (1960)
? 79. 1982 Gabriel Garc¨ªa M¨¢rquez 6 March 1927¨C17 April 2014, aged 87 (Columbian)
Gabriel Jos¨¦ de la Concordia Garc¨ªa M¨¢rquez was a novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter, and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo or Gabito throughout Latin America. Considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century, he was awarded the 1972 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1982 Nobel Prize. He pursued a self-directed education, leaving law school for a career in journalism. He showed no inhibitions in his criticism of Colombian and foreign politics. Garc¨ªa M¨¢rquez wrote many non-fiction works and short stories, but is best known for his novels which have achieved significant acclaim for popularising magic realism and most of his works explore the theme of solitude. Juan Manuel Santos, the president of Colombia, called him "the greatest Colombian who ever lived."
One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
? 80. 1983 William Golding 19 September 1911¨C19 June 1993, aged 81 (Cornish-British, English)
Sir William Gerald Golding, CBE FRSL was a schoolteacher, novelist, playwright, and poet. Best known for his debut novel Lord of the Flies (1954), he would go on to publish another eleven novels. In 1980, he was awarded the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage, the first novel in his sea trilogy, To the Ends of the Earth. As a result of contributions to literature, Golding was knighted in 1988. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2008, The Times ranked Golding third on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Lord of the Flies (1954)
? 81. 1984 Jaroslav Seifert 23 September 1901¨C10 January 1986, aged 84 (Czechoslovakian)
Jaroslav Seifert was a writer, poet and journalist. In 1984 Jaroslav Seifert won the Nobel Prize "for his poetry which endowed with freshness, sensuality and rich inventiveness provides a liberating image of the indomitable spirit and versatility of man." Born in ?i?kov, a suburb of Prague in what was then part of Austria-Hungary, Seifert's first collection of poems was published in 1921. He was a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KS?), the editor of a number of communist newspapers and magazines, and the employee of a communist publishing house. During the 1920s he was considered a leading representative of the Czechoslovakian artistic avant-garde. He was one of the founders of the journal Dev¨§tsil. In March 1929, he and six other writers left the KS? after signing a manifesto protesting against Bolshevik Stalinist-influenced tendencies in the new leadership of the party. He subsequently worked as a journalist in the social-democratic and trade union press during the 1930s and 1940s. In 1949 Seifert left journalism to devote himself exclusively to literature. His poetry was awarded important state prizes in 1936, 1955, and 1968, and in 1967 he was designated National Artist. He was the official Chairman of the Czechoslovak Writer's Union (1968¨C70). In 1977 he was one of the signatories of Charter 77 in opposition to the government of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. Due to bad health, he was not present at the award ceremony, and so his daughter received the Nobel Prize in his name. Even though it was a matter of great importance, there was only a brief remark of the award in the state-controlled media.
On the Waves of TSF / Na vln¨¢ch TSF (1925)
? 82. 1985 Claude Simon 10 October 1913¨C6 July 2005, aged (Madagascan, French)
Claude Simon was born in Tananarive on the isle of Madagascar. His parents were French, his father was killed in WWI. He grew up with his mother and her family in Perpignan in the middle of the wine district of Roussillon. After secondary school at Coll¨¨ge Stanislas in Paris and brief sojourns at Oxford and Cambridge Simon took courses in painting at the Andr¨¦ Lhote Academy. He then travelled extensively through Spain, Germany, the Soviet Union, Italy and Greece. This experience as well as those from WWII show up in his literary work. At the beginning of the war Claude Simon took part in the battle of the Meuse (1940) and was taken prisoner, but managed to escape and join the resistance. At the same time he completed his first novel. Simon's work is thematically and stylistically highly original with war as a constant and central theme. In 1960, he was a signatory to the Manifesto of the 121 in favour of Algerian independence. In 1961 Claude Simon received the prize of L'Express for La Route des Flandres and in 1967 the M¨¦dicis prize for Histoire. The University of East Anglia made him an honorary doctor in 1973.
The Flanders Road (1960)
? 83. 1986 Wole Soyinka b. 13 July 1934 (Nigerian)
Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka, known as Wole Soyinka, is a playwright, poet and essayist, and the first sub-Saharan African to be awarded the Nobel Prize. Soyinka was born into a Yoruba family in Abeokuta. In 1954, he attended Government College in Ibadan, and subsequently University College Ibadan and the University of Leeds in England. After studying in Nigeria and the UK, he worked with the Royal Court Theatre in London. He went on to write plays that were produced in both countries, in theatres and on radio. He took an active role in Nigeria's political history and its struggle for independence from Great Britain. In 1967, during the Nigerian Civil War, he was arrested and put in solitary confinement for two years. Soyinka has been a strong critic of successive Nigerian governments, especially the country's many military dictators, as well as other political tyrannies, including the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe. Much of his writing has been concerned with "the oppressive boot and the irrelevance of the colour of the foot that wears it". With civilian rule restored to Nigeria in 1999, Soyinka returned to his nation.
The Lion and the Jewel (1963)
? 84. 1987 Joseph Brodsky 24 May 1940¨C28 January 1996, aged 55 (Russian, American - Jewish)
Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky was a poet and essayist. Born in Leningrad, Brodsky ran afoul of Soviet authorities and was "strongly advised" to emigrate from the Soviet Union in 1972, settling in the USA with the help of W. H. Auden and other supporters. He taught at various colleges and universities including Yale, Columbia, and Cambridge. Brodsky was awarded the Nobel Prize "for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity". In 1991 he was appointed US Poet Laureate. Professor Andrey Ranchin of Moscow State University stated, ¡°Brodsky's literary canonisation is an exceptional phenomenon. No other contemporary Russian writer has been honoured as the hero of such a number of memoir texts; no other has had so many conferences devoted to them¡±.
Selected Poems: 1968-96
? 85. 1988 Naguib Mahfouz 11 December 1911¨C30 August 2006, aged 94 (Egyptian)
Naguib Mahfouz (Arabic: ???? ??????,) was an Egyptian novelist, writer, and screenwriter. He is regarded as one of the first contemporary writers of Arabic literature, along with Taha Hussein, to explore themes of existentialism. He published 34 novels, over 350 short stories, dozens of movie scripts, hundreds of op-ed columns for Egyptian newspapers, and five plays over a 70-year career. Many of his works have been made into Egyptian and foreign films. Mahfouz was born in a lower middle-class Muslim Egyptian family in Old Cairo in 1911. He was the 7th and the youngest child, with all of his siblings being much older. (Experientially, he grew up an "only child.") The Mahfouz family were devout Muslims and Mahfouz had a strict Islamic upbringing. In an interview, he elaborated on the stern religious climate at home during his childhood. He stated that "You would never have thought that an artist would emerge from that family." Most of Mahfouz's writings deal mainly with politics, a fact he acknowledged: "In all my writings, you will find politics. You may find a story which ignores love or any other subject, but not politics; it is the very axis of our thinking".
He was the first and so far only Arabic Nobel Laureate.
Palace Walk (1946)
? 86. 1989 Camilo Jos¨¦ Cela 11 May 1916¨C17 January 2002, aged 85 (Galician)
Camilo Jos¨¦ Cela y Trulock, 1st Marquis of Iria Flavia was a novelist, poet, story writer and essayist associated with the Generation of '36 movement. He was born in the rural parish of Iria Flavia, in Padr¨®n, A Coru?a, Spain, the eldest of 9 siblings. His father was Galician and his mother was a Galician of English and Italian ancestry. The family was upper-middle-class and Cela described his childhood as being "so happy it was hard to grow up." They moved to Madrid in 1925 and In 1931 Cela was diagnosed with tuberculosis and admitted to a sanatorium, where at the age of 15 he took advantage of his free time to write. The Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936 when Cela was 20 years old and just recovering from his illness. His political leanings were conservative and he escaped to the rebel zone. He enlisted himself as a soldier but was wounded and hospitalised in Logro?o. The war ended in 1939 and Cela became a censor in Francoist Spain in 1943, where his own writing came under scrutiny from his fellow censors. Cela was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1989 "for a rich and intensive prose, which with restrained compassion forms a challenging vision of man's vulnerability".
The Family of Pascual Duarte (1942)
? 87. 1990 Octavio Paz 31 March 1914¨C 19 April 1998, aged 84 (Mexican)
Octavio Paz Lozano was a Mexican writer, poet, and diplomat, and the winner of the 1982 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature ("for impassioned writing with wide horizons, characterised by sensuous intelligence and humanistic integrity.")
The Poems of Octavio Paz (1931-1996)
Nobel Laureates Challenge, post 101901-1990
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? 88. 1991 Nadine Gordimer 20 November 1923 ¨C 13 July 2014, aged 90 (South African)
Nadine Gordimer was a writer and political activist. She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991, recognised as a writer "who through her magnificent epic writing has ... been of very great benefit to humanity". Gordimer's writing dealt with moral and racial issues, particularly apartheid in South Africa. Under that regime, works such as Burger's Daughter and July's People were banned. She was active in the anti-apartheid movement, joining the African National Congress during the days when the organisation was banned, and gave Nelson Mandela advice on his famous 1964 defence speech at the trial which led to his conviction for life. She was also active in HIV/AIDS causes.
July's People (1981)
? 89. 1992 Derek Walcott, 23 January 1930¨C17 March 2017, aged 87 (St. Lucian)
Sir Derek Alton Walcott KCSL OBE OCC was a poet and playwright. He was the University of Alberta's first distinguished scholar in residence, where he taught undergraduate and graduate writing courses. He also served as Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence in Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.
The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013
? 90. 1993 Toni Morrison, 18 February 1931¨C5 August 2019, aged 88 (American)
Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford, known as Toni Morrison, was a novelist. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987. Born and raised in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison graduated from Howard University in 1953 with a B.A. in English. She earned a master's degree in American Literature from Cornell University in 1955. In 1957 she returned to Howard University, was married, and had two children before divorcing in 1964. Morrison became the first black female editor in fiction at Random House in New York City in the late 1960s. She developed her own reputation as an author in the 1970s and '80s. Her work, Beloved, was made into a 1998 film. Morrison's works are praised for addressing the harsh consequences of racism in the United States.
Home (2011)
? 91. 1994 Kenzabur¨ ?e, b. 31 January 1935 (Japanese)
Kenzabur¨ ?e (´ó½ ½¡ÈýÀÉ, ?e Kenzabur¨, born 31 January 1935) is a writer and a major figure in contemporary Japanese literature. His novels, short stories and essays, strongly influenced by French and American literature and literary theory, deal with political, social and philosophical issues, including nuclear weapons, nuclear power, social non-conformism, and existentialism. ?e was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994 for creating "an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today".
A Personal Matter (1964)
? 92. 1995 Seamus Heaney, 13 April 1939¨C30 August 2013, aged 74 (Irish)
Seamus Justin Heaney MRIA was a poet, playwright and translator. Among his best-known works is Death of a Naturalist (1966), his first major published volume. Heaney was and is still recognised as one of the principal contributors to poetry in Ireland during his lifetime. American poet Robert Lowell described him as "the most important Irish poet since Yeats", and many others, including the academic John Sutherland, have said that he was "the greatest poet of our age". Robert Pinsky has stated that "with his wonderful gift of eye and ear Heaney has the gift of the story-teller." Upon his death in 2013, The Independent described him as "probably the best-known poet in the world".
Beowulf (2001) translation
? 93. 1996 Wis?awa Szymborska 2 July 1923¨C1 February 2012, aged 88 (Polish)
Maria Wis?awa Anna Szymborska was a poet, essayist, and translator. Born in Prowent, which has since become part of K¨®rnik, she later resided in Krak¨®w until the end of her life. In Poland, Szymborska's books have reached sales rivaling prominent prose authors', though she wrote in her poem, "Some Like Poetry" ("Niekt¨®rzy lubi? poezj?"), that "perhaps" two in a thousand people like poetry. In her last years, Szymborska collaborated with Polish jazz trumpeter Tomasz Sta¨½ko, who dedicated his record Wis?awa (ECM, 2013) to her memory, taking inspiration from their collaboration and her poetry.
Map: Collected and Last Poems (1944-2011)
?94. 1997 Dario Fo 24 March 1926-13 October 2016 (Italian)
Dario Luigi Angelo Fo was an actor, playwright, comedian, singer, theatre director, stage designer, songwriter, painter, and political campaigner for the Italian left wing. In his time he was "arguably the most widely performed contemporary playwright in world theatre". His plays have been translated into 30 languages and performed across the world, including in Argentina, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Iran, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States and Yugoslavia. Fo's solo pi¨¨ce c¨¦l¨¨bre, titled Mistero Buffo was performed over a 30-year period, and is recognised as being both controversial and popular and has been denounced as "the most blasphemous show in the history of television". The title of the original English translation of Non Si Paga! Non Si Paga! (Can't Pay? Won't Pay!) has passed into the English language. "The play captures something universal in actions and reactions of the working class." His receipt of the Nobel Prize marked the "international acknowledgment of Fo as a major figure in 20th-century world theatre". The Swedish Academy praised Fo as a writer "who emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden". Fo was an atheist and owned and operated a theatre company.
We Can't Pay? We Won't Pay! (1977)
? 95. 1998 Jos¨¦ Saramago, 16 November 1922¨C18 June 2010, aged 87 (Portuguese)
Jos¨¦ de Sousa Saramago, GColSE ComSE GColCa was a writer and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature for his "parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony [with which he] continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality." His works, some of which can be seen as allegories, commonly present subversive perspectives on historic events, emphasising the theo-poetic human factor. In 2003 Harold Bloom described Saramago as "the most gifted novelist alive in the world today" and in 2010 said he considers Saramago to be "a permanent part of the Western canon", while James Wood praises "the distinctive tone to his fiction because he narrates his novels as if he were someone both wise and ignorant." More than 2 million copies of Saramago's books have been sold in Portugal alone and his work has been translated into 25 languages.A proponent of libertarian communism, Saramago criticised institutions such as the Catholic Church, the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. An atheist, he defended love as an instrument to improve the human condition. In 1992, the Government of Portugal under Prime Minister An¨ªbal Cavaco Silva ordered the removal of one of his works, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, from the Aristeion Prize's shortlist, claiming the work was religiously offensive. Disheartened by this political censorship of his work, Saramago went into exile on the Spanish island of Lanzarote, where he lived alongside his Spanish wife Pilar del R¨ªo until his death in 2010. Saramago was a founding member of the National Front for the Defense of Culture in Lisbon in 1992, and co-founder with Orhan Pamuk, of the European Writers' Parliament (EWP).
Skylight (1953)
? 96. 1999 G¨¹nter Grass, 16 October 1927¨C13 April 2015, aged 87 (Kashubian)
G¨¹nter Wilhelm Grass (born Gra?)was a novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, sculptor, and recipient of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was born in the Free City of Danzig (now Gda¨½sk, Poland). As a teenager, he served as a drafted soldier from late 1944 in the Waffen-SS and was taken as a prisoner of war by U.S. forces at the end of the war in May 1945. He was released in April 1946. Trained as a stonemason and sculptor, Grass began writing in the 1950s. In his fiction, he frequently returned to the Danzig of his childhood. Grass is best known for his first novel, The Tin Drum (1959), a key text in European magic realism. It was the first book of his Danzig Trilogy, the other two being Cat and Mouse and Dog Years. His works are frequently considered to have a left-wing political dimension, and Grass was an active supporter of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). The Tin Drum was adapted as a film of the same name, which won both the 1979 Palme d'Or and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. In 1999, the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature, praising him as a writer "whose frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history".
Novemberland: Selected Poems, 1956-1993
? 97. 2000 Gao Xingjian (Chinese, French)
GAO XINGJIAN (whose name is pronounced gow shing-jen) is a playwright and celebrated painter as well as a fiction writer and critic. Born in 1940 in Jiangxi province in eastern China, he studied in state schools, earned a university degree in French in Beijing, and embarked on a life of letters. Choosing exile in 1987, he settled in Paris, where he completed Soul Mountain two years later. In 1992 he was named a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. He is the first Chinese recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather (1989)
Nobel Laureates Challenge, post 111901-2000
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?98. 2001 V.S. Naipaul, 17 August 1932¨C11 August 2018, aged 85 (Trini/British)
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was a Trinidad and Tobago-born British writer of works of fiction and nonfiction in English. He is known for his comic early novels set in Trinidad, his bleaker novels of alienation in the wider world, and his vigilant chronicles of life and travels. He wrote in prose that was widely admired, but his views sometimes aroused controversy. He published more than 30 books over 50 years. Naipaul won the Booker Prize in 1971 for his novel In a Free State. He won the Jerusalem Prize in 1983, and in 1989, he was awarded the Trinity Cross, Trinidad and Tobago's highest national honour. He received a knighthood in Britain in 1990.
The Nightwatchman's Occurrence Book: And Other Comic Inventions (1958, 1963, & 1967)
?99. 2002 Imre Kert¨¦sz, 9 November 1929 ¨C 31 March 2016, aged 86. (Hungarian - Jewish)
Imre Kert¨¦szwas a Hungarian author and recipient of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature, "for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history". He was the first Hungarian to win the Nobel in Literature. His works deal with themes of the Holocaust (he was a survivor of a German concentration camp), dictatorship and personal freedom. He died at his home in Budapest after suffering from Parkinson's for several years.
Kaddish for an Unborn Child (1990)
?100. 2003 J.M. Coetzee, b. 9 February 1940 (South African/Australian)
John Maxwell Coetzee is a novelist, essayist, linguist, and translator. He is one of the most critically acclaimed and decorated authors in the English language and has won the Booker Prize twice, the CNA Prize thrice, the Jerusalem Prize, the Prix Femina ¨¦tranger, and The Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and holds a number of other awards and honorary doctorates. Coetzee moved to Australia in 2002 and became an Australian citizen in 2006. He lives in Adelaide.
Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life (1997)
?101. 2004 Elfriede Jelinek, b. 20 October 1946 (Austrian)
Elfriede Jelinek is an Austrian playwright and novelist. She is one of the most decorated authors writing in German today and was awarded the Nobel Prize for her "musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that, with extraordinary linguistic zeal, reveal the absurdity of society's clich¨¦s and their subjugating power". Next to Peter Handke and Botho Strauss she is considered to be the most important living playwright of the German language.
The Piano Teacher (1983)
? 102. 2005 Harold Pinter 10 October 1930¨C24 December 2008 (English - Jewish)
Harold Pinter CH CBE was a playwright, screenwriter, director and actor, and one of the most influential modern British dramatists with a writing career that spanned more than 50 years. He also directed or acted in radio, stage, television, and film productions. Born in Hackney, east London, the only child of British Jewish parents, Pinter's family home in London is described by his official biographer Michael Billington as "a solid, red-brick, 3-storey villa just off the noisy, bustling, traffic-ridden thoroughfare of the Lower Clapton Road". In 1940-41, after the Blitz, Pinter was evacuated from their house in London to Cornwall and Reading. Billington states that the "life-and-death intensity of daily experience" before and during the Blitz left Pinter with profound memories "of loneliness, bewilderment, separation and loss: themes that are in all his works." The Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel Prize to Pinter, who "in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms". This instigated some criticism relating both to characteristics of Pinter's work and to his politics. When interviewed about his reaction to the announcement, Pinter said: "I was told today that one of the Sky channels said this morning that 'Harold Pinter is dead.' Then they changed their mind and said, 'No, he's won the Nobel prize.' So I've risen from the dead." After the Academy notified Pinter of his award, he had planned to travel to Stockholm to present his Nobel Lecture in person, however, he was hospitalised with a serious infection, so his publisher, Stephen Page of Faber and Faber, accepted the Nobel Diploma and Nobel Medal at the Awards Ceremony in his place.
The Caretaker (1960)
103. 2006 Orhan Pamuk b. 7 June 1952 (Turkish)
Ferit Orhan Pamuk is a novelist, screenwriter, and academic. One of Turkey's most prominent novelists, his work has sold over 13 million books in 63 languages, making him the country's best-selling writer. Pamuk is the Robert Yik-Fong Tam Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, where he teaches writing and comparative literature. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2018. Of partial Circassian descent and born in Istanbul, Pamuk is the first Turkish Nobel laureate. He is also the recipient of numerous other literary awards. My Name Is Red won the 2002 Prix du Meilleur Livre ?tranger, 2002 Premio Grinzane Cavour and 2003 International Dublin Literary Award. The European Writers' Parliament came about as a result of a joint proposal by Pamuk and Jos¨¦ Saramago. Pamuk's willingness to write books about contentious historical and political events put him at risk of censure in his homeland. In 2005, an ultra-nationalist lawyer sued him over a statement regarding the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire. His intention, according to Pamuk himself, had been to highlight issues relating to freedom of speech in the country of his birth. The court initially declined to hear the case, but in 2011 Pamuk was ordered to pay 6,000 liras in total compensation for having insulted the plaintiffs' honour. The Nobel Prize was awarded to Orhan Pamuk "who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures."
Snow (2002)
? 104. 2007 Doris Lessing 22 October 1919¨C17 November 2013, aged 94 (Iranian, Rhodesian, English)
Doris May Lessing CH OMG (n¨¦e Tayler) was born to British parents in Iran, where she lived until 1925. Her family then moved to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where she remained until moving to London. As well as campaigning against nuclear arms, she was an active opponent of apartheid, which led her to being banned from South Africa and Rhodesia for many years. In the same year, following the Soviet invasion of Hungary, she left the British Communist Party. In the 1980s, when Lessing was vocal in her opposition to Soviet actions in Afghanistan, she gave her views on feminism, communism and sci-fi in an interview with The New York Times. In 2015, a 5-volume secret file on Lessing built up by the British intelligence agencies, MI5 and MI6, was made public and placed in The National Archives. The file, which contains documents that are redacted in parts, shows Lessing was under surveillance by British spies for around 20 years, from the early 1940s onwards due to her associations with Communism and her anti-racist activism. In awarding Lessing the Nobel in 2007, the Swedish Academy described her as "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny". Lessing was the oldest person ever to receive the Nobel, and had been writing since the age of 15. In 2001, she was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in British literature. In 2008, The Times ranked her 5th on a list of The 50 greatest British writers since 1945.
The Golden Notebook (1962)
? 105. 2008 J.M.G. Le Cl¨¦zio, b. 13 April 1940 (French/Mauritian)
Jean-Marie Gustave Le Cl¨¦zio, usually identified as J. M. G. Le Cl¨¦zio is a writer and professor. The author of over 40 works, he was awarded the 1963 Prix Renaudot for his novel Le Proc¨¨s-Verbal and the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature for his life's work, as an "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilisation" and for being focused on the environment, especially the desert. The Swedish Academy, in announcing the award, called Le Cl¨¦zio an "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilisation." Le Cl¨¦zio used his Nobel prize acceptance lecture to attack the subject of information poverty. The title of his lecture was Dans la for¨ºt des paradoxes ("In the forest of paradoxes"), a title he attributed to Stig Dagerman. Gao Xingjian, a Chinese ¨¦migr¨¦ writing in Mandarin, was the previous French citizen to receive the prize (for 2000); Le Cl¨¦zio was the first French-language writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature since Claude Simon for 1985, and the 14th since Sully Prudhomme, laureate of the first prize of 1901. He is a staunch defender of Mama Rosa, director of a Mexican shelter raided by the police in July 2014 when children were found eating rotten food and kept against the will of their parents. He wrote an article in Le Monde arguing that she is close to sanctity.
Fever (1965)
? 106. 2009 Herta M¨¹ller, b.17 August 1953 (Romanian/German)
Herta M¨¹ller is a novelist, poet, and essayist. Born in Ni?chidorf, Timi? County in Romania, her native language is German. Since the early 1990s, she has been internationally established, and her works have been translated into more than 20 languages. M¨¹ller is noted for her works depicting the effects of violence, cruelty and terror, usually in the setting of the Socialist Republic of Romania under the repressive Nicolae Ceau?escu regime which she has experienced herself. Many of her works are told from the viewpoint of the German minority in Romania and are also a depiction of the modern history of the Germans in the Banat and Transylvania. M¨¹ller has received more than 20 awards to date, including the Kleist Prize (1994), the Aristeion Prize (1995), the International Dublin Literary Award (1998) and the Franz Werfel Human Rights Award (2009). On 8 October 2009, the Swedish Academy announced that she had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, describing her as a woman "who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed".
The Appointment (1997)
? 107. 2010 Mario Vargas Llosa, b. 28 March 1936 (Peruvian)
Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa, 1st Marquis of Vargas Llosa is a writer, journalist, essayist, college professor, and a former politician, who also holds Spanish citizenship. He is one of Latin America's most significant novelists and essayists, and one of the leading writers of his generation. Some critics consider him to have had a larger international impact and worldwide audience than any other writer of the Latin American Boom. He was awarded the Nobel Prize "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat."
The Temptation of the Impossible: Victor Hugo and Les Mis¨¦rables (2004).
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? 108. 2011 Tomas Transtr?mer, 15 April 1931¨C26 March 2015, aged 83 (Swedish)
Tomas G?sta Transtr?mer was a poet, psychologist and translator.His poems captured the long Swedish winters, the rhythm of the seasons and the palpable, atmospheric beauty of nature. Transtr?mer's work is also characterised by a sense of mystery and wonder underlying the routine of everyday life, a quality which often gives his poems a religious dimension. Transtr?mer is acclaimed as one of the most important Scandinavian writers since WW2. His poetry has been translated into over 60 languages. He was the recipient of the 1990 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the 2004 International Nonino Prize, as well as the Nobel. Transtr?mer suffered a stroke in 1990 that left him partially paralysed and unable to speak; however, he continued to write and publish poetry through the early 2000s. Transtr?mer played the piano throughout his life; after his stroke, which paralysed the right side of his body, he taught himself to play only with his left hand. He often said that the playing was a way for him to continue living after the stroke. Transtr?mer's daughter Emma is a concert singer. In 2011 she released the album Dagsmeja, containing songs based on His poems. Many composers and musicians have worked with his poems. Among these are Jan Garbarek, Ulf Grahn, Madeleine Isaksson, Margareta Hallin, Lars Edlund, Sven-David Sandstr?m, Jan Sandstr?m and Anders Eliasson. Transtr?mer died in Stockholm on 26 March 2015 at 83, less than 3 weeks before his 84th birthday.
New Collected Poems (2006)
109. 2012 Mo Yan, b. 17 February 1955 (Chinese)
Guan Moye better known by the pen name Mo Yan, which translates as 'Don't Speak', is a novelist and short story writer. Donald Morrison of U.S. news magazine TIME referred to him as "one of the most famous, oft-banned and widely pirated of all Chinese writers", and Jim Leach called him the Chinese answer to Franz Kafka or Joseph Heller. He is best known to Western readers for his 1987 novel Red Sorghum Clan, of which the Red Sorghum and Sorghum Wine volumes were later adapted for the film Red Sorghum in 1988 and won the prize at the Berlin International Film Festival. He won the 2005 International Nonino Prize in Italy. In 2009, he was the first recipient of the University of Oklahoma's Newman Prize for Chinese Literature. In 2012, Mo was awarded the Nobel for his work as a writer "who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary".
Red Sorghum (1987)
110. 2013 Alice Munro, b. 10 July 1931 (Canadian)
Alice Ann Munro is a short story writer. Her work has been described as revolutionising the architecture of short stories, especially in its tendency to move forward and backward in time, and are able to "embed more than announce, reveal more than parade." Munro's fiction is most often set in her native Huron County in southwestern Ontario and explore human complexities in an uncomplicated prose style. Munro's writing has established her as "one of our greatest contemporary writers of fiction", or, as Cynthia Ozick put it, "our Chekhov." Munro has received many literary accolades, including the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature for her work as "master of the contemporary short story", and the 2009 Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work. She is also a three-time winner of Canada's Governor General's Award for fiction, and received the Writers' Trust of Canada's 1996 Marian Engel Award and the 2004 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize for Runaway.
Dance of the Happy Shades (1968)
? 111. 2014 Patrick Modiano, 30 July 1945 (French)
Jean Patrick Modiano is a novelist. He previously won the 2012 Austrian State Prize for European Literature, the 2010 Prix mondial Cino Del Duca from the Institut de France for lifetime achievement, the 1978 Prix Goncourt for Rue des boutiques obscures, and the 1972 Grand Prix du roman de l'Acad¨¦mie fran?aise for Les Boulevards de ceinture. His works have been translated into more than 30 languages and have been celebrated in and around France, but most of his novels had not been translated into English before he was awarded the Nobel Prize.
Missing Person (1978)
? 112. 2015 Svetlana Alexievich, b. 31 May 1948 (Ukrainian/Soviet/Belarusian)
Svetlana Alexandrovna Alexievich is an investigative journalist, essayist and oral historian who writes in Russian. She was awarded the Nobel Prize "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time". She is the first writer from Belarus to receive the award.
Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future (1997)
? 113. 2016 Bob Dylan b. 24 May 1941 (American)
Robert Dylan (born Robert Allen Zimmerman) is a singer-songwriter, author and visual artist. Often regarded as one of the greatest songwriters of all time, Dylan has been a major figure in popular culture during a career spanning 60 years. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s, when songs such as "Blowin' in the Wind" (1963) and "The Times They Are a-Changin'" (1964) became anthems for the civil rights and anti-war movements. His lyrics during this period incorporated a range of political, social, philosophical, and literary influences, defying pop music conventions and appealing to the burgeoning counterculture. Dylan has toured continuously since the late 1980s on what has become known as the Never Ending Tour. Since 1994, Dylan has published eight books of drawings and paintings, and his work has been exhibited in major art galleries. He has sold more than 125 million records, making him one of the best-selling musicians of all time. He has received numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, ten Grammy Awards, a Golden Globe, and an Academy Award. Dylan has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame. The Pulitzer Prize Board in 2008 awarded him a special citation for "his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power". In 2016, Dylan was awarded the Nobel "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition".
Lyrics, 1962-1985
? 114. 2017 Kazuo Ishiguro, b. 8 November 1954 (Japanese/British)
Sir Kazuo Ishiguro OBE FRSA FRSL is a novelist, screenwriter, musician, and short-story writer. He was born in Nagasaki, Japan and moved to Britain in 1960 with his parents when he was 5. A graduate of the University of East Anglia, Ishiguro is one of the most celebrated contemporary fiction authors in English. His first two novels, A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World, were noted for their explorations of Japanese identity and elegiac tone. Subsequently, he explored other genres, including science fiction and historical fiction. He has received four Man Booker Prize nominations and won the award in 1989 for his novel The Remains of the Day, which was adapted into a film of the same name in 1993. Fellow author Salman Rushdie has praised the novel as Ishiguro's masterpiece, in which he "turned away from the Japanese settings of his first two novels and revealed that his sensibility was not rooted in any one place, but capable of travel and metamorphosis". Time named Ishiguro's science fiction novel Never Let Me Go the best novel of 2005 and one of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005. In 2017, the Swedish Academy awarded Ishiguro the Nobel, describing him in its citation as a writer "who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world".
The Remains of the Day (1989)
115. 2018 Olga Tokarczuk b. 29 January 1962 (Polish)
Olga Nawoja Tokarczuk is a writer, activist, and public intellectual considered one of the most critically acclaimed and successful authors of her generation in Poland. She was first Polish female prose writer awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for a narrative imagination that with encyclopaedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life." For her novel Flights, Tokarczuk has been awarded the 2018 Man Booker International Prize (translated by Jennifer Croft). Tokarczuk is particularly noted for the mythical tone of her writing. A clinical psychologist from the University of Warsaw, she has published a collection of poems, several novels, as well as other books with shorter prose works. For Flights and The Books of Jacob, she won the Nike Awards, Poland's top literary prize, among other accolades; she also won 5 times Nike audience award. In 2015, she received the German-Polish Bridge Prize for contribution in mutual understanding between European nations. Tokarczuk faced some backlash from nationalist groups in her homeland after the publication of The Books of Jacob, as set in 18th century Poland, the novel celebrates the country¡¯s cultural diversity. Her works have been translated into almost 40 languages, making her one of the most translated contemporary Polish writers.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2009)
? 116. 2019 Peter Handke b. 6 December 1942 (Austrian)
Peter Handke is a novelist, playwright, translator, poet, film director, and screenwriter. He was awarded the Nobel "for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience." Prompted by his mother's suicide in 1971, he reflected her life in the novel Wunschloses Ungl¨¹ck (A Sorrow Beyond Dreams). He collaborated with director Wim Wenders, leading to screenplays such as The Wrong Move and Der Himmel ¨¹ber Berlin (Wings of Desire).
The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1970)
? 117. 2020 Louise Gl¨¹ck, b. April 22, 1943 (American/Jewish)
Louise Elisabeth Gl¨¹ck is a poet and essayist. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal." Her other awards include the Pulitzer Prize, National Humanities Medal, National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Bollingen Prize. From 2003 to 2004, she was Poet Laureate of the United States. Gl¨¹ck is often described as an autobiographical poet; her work is known for its emotional intensity and for frequently drawing on mythology or nature imagery to meditate on personal experiences and modern life. Thematically, her poems have illuminated aspects of trauma, desire, and nature. In doing so, they have become known for frank expressions of sadness and isolation.
Firstborn: Poems (1968)
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? 118. 2021 Abdulrazak Gurnah, 20 December 1948 (Tanzanian/English)
Abdulrazak Gurnah FRSL is a Tanzanian-born novelist and academic who lives in England. He was born in the Sultanate of Zanzibar and moved to the UK in the 1960s as a refugee during the Zanzibar Revolution. His novels include Paradise (1994), which was shortlisted for both the Booker and the Whitbread Prize; Desertion (2005); and By the Sea (2001), which was long-listed for the Booker and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Gurnah was awarded the Nobel Prize "for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fates of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents". He is Emeritus Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent.
By the Sea (2002)
The Reading Challenge Group
Books mentioned in this topic
The Remains of the Day (other topics)Missing Person (other topics)
By the Sea (other topics)
Red Sorghum (other topics)
Chernobyl Prayer: Voices from Chernobyl (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Abdulrazak Gurnah (other topics)Tomas Transtr?mer (other topics)
Mo Yan (other topics)
Patrick Modiano (other topics)
Svetlana Alexievich (other topics)
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**Start Date: 1 January 2020**
Nobel Laureates 1901-191011/11
Read in January 2020
? 1. 1901 Sully Prudhomme 16 March 1839¨C6 September 1907, aged 68 (French)
Ren¨¦ Fran?ois Armand (Sully) Prudhomme was a French poet and essayist. He was the first winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901. Born in Paris, Prudhomme originally studied to be an engineer, but turned to philosophy and later to poetry; he declared it as his intention to create scientific poetry for modern times.
Les Vaines Tendresses (1875)
? 2. 1902 Theodor Mommsen 30 November 1817¨C1 November 1903, aged 85 (German)
Christian Matthias Theodor Mommsen was a German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician and archaeologist. He was one of the greatest classicists of the 19th century. His work regarding Roman history is still of fundamental importance for contemporary research.
The History of Rome, Vol 1 (1854)
Read in February 2020
? 3. 1903 Bj?rnstjerne Bj?rnson 8 December 1832¨C26 April 1910, aged 77 (Norwegian)
Bj?rnstjerne Martinius Bj?rnson was a Norwegian writer who received the 1903 Nobel Prize in Literature "as a tribute to his noble, magnificent and versatile poetry, which has always been distinguished by both the freshness of its inspiration and the rare purity of its spirit", becoming the first Norwegian Nobel laureate.
A Happy Boy (1860)
? 4. 1904 Fr¨¦d¨¦ric Mistral 8 September 1830¨C25 March 1914, aged 83 (Proven?al)
Jos¨¨p Est¨¨ve Frederic Mistral was an Occitan writer and lexicographer of the Occitan language. Mistral received the 1904 Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of the fresh originality and true inspiration of his poetic production, which faithfully reflects the natural scenery and native spirit of his people, and, in addition, his significant work as a Proven?al philologist".
Memoirs of Frederic Mistral (1906)
? 5. 1904 Jos¨¦ Echegaray 19 April 1832¨C4 September 1916, aged 84 (Spanish)
Jos¨¦ Echegaray y Eizaguirre was a Spanish civil engineer, mathematician, statesman, and one of the leading Spanish dramatists of the last quarter of the 19th century. He was awarded the 1904 Nobel Prize for Literature "in recognition of the numerous and brilliant compositions which, in an individual and original manner, have revived the great traditions of the Spanish drama".
The Great Galeoto: Folly or Saintliness (1881)
? 6. 1905 Henryk Sienkiewicz 5 May 1846¨C15 November 1916, aged 70 (Polish)
Henryk Adam Aleksander Pius Sienkiewicz, also known by the pseudonym Litwos, was a Polish journalist, novelist and Nobel Prize laureate. He is best remembered for his historical novels, especially his internationally known best-seller Quo Vadis (1896).
Without Dogma (1891)
? 7. 1906 Giosu¨¨ Carducci 27 July 1835¨C16 February 1907, aged 71 (Italian)
Giosu¨¨ Alessandro Giuseppe Carducci, also Giosue Carducci in later years, was an Italian poet, writer, literary critic and teacher. He was very influential and was regarded as the official national poet of modern Italy. In 1906 he became the first Italian to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature "not only in consideration of his deep learning and critical research, but above all as a tribute to the creative energy, freshness of style, and lyrical force which characterise his poetic masterpieces".
Poems of Giosu¨¨ Carducci Translated with Two Introductory Essays: I. Giosue Carducci and the Hellenic Reaction in Italy; II Carducci and the Classic Realism (1893)
? 8. 1907 Rudyard Kipling 30 December 1865¨C18 January 1936, aged 70 (English)
Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English journalist, short-story writer, poet, and novelist. He was born in India, which inspired much of his work. Kipling is seen as an innovator in the art of the short story and his children's books are classics; one critic noted "a versatile and luminous narrative gift". In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, as the first English-language writer to receive the prize, and at 41, its youngest recipient to date. He was also sounded for the British Poet Laureateship and several times for a knighthood, but declined both. Following his death in 1936, his ashes were interred at Poets' Corner, part of the South Transept of Westminster Abbey.
Captains Courageous (1897)
? 9. 1908 Rudolf Christoph Eucken 5 January 1846¨C15 September 1926, aged 80. (German)
Rudolf Christoph Eucken was a German philosopher. He received the 1908 Nobel Prize for Literature "in recognition of his earnest search for truth, his penetrating power of thought, his wide range of vision, and the warmth and strength in presentation with which in his numerous works he has vindicated and developed an idealistic philosophy of life".
Collected Essays of Rudolf Eucken (1914)
? 10. 1909 Selma Lagerl?f 20 November 1858¨C16 March 1940, aged 81 (Swedish)
On 10 December 1909, Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerl?f won the Nobel Prize "in appreciation of the lofty idealism, vivid imagination, and spiritual perception that characterise her writings." In 1904, the Academy had awarded her its great gold medal, and in 1914, she also became a member of the academy. For both the academy membership and her Nobel literature prize, she was the first woman to be so honoured. In 1991, she became the first woman to be depicted on a Swedish banknote, when the first 20-kronor note was released.
Invisible Links (1894)
? 11. 1910 Paul von Heyse 15 March 1830¨C2 April 1914, aged 84 (German)
Paul Johann Ludwig von Heyse was a distinguished German writer and translator. A member of two important literary societies, the Tunnel ¨¹ber der Spree in Berlin and Die Krokodile in Munich, he wrote novels, poetry, 177 short stories, and about sixty dramas. The sum of Heyse's many and varied productions made him a dominant figure among German men of letters. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1910 "as a tribute to the consummate artistry, permeated with idealism, which he has demonstrated during his long productive career as a lyric poet, dramatist, novelist and writer of world-renowned short stories." Wirsen, one of the Nobel judges, said that "Germany has not had a greater literary genius since Goethe." Heyse is the fifth oldest laureate in literature, after Sully Prudhomme, Theodor Mommsen, Alice Munro and Jaroslav Seifert.
The Dead Lake and Other Tales (Translated by Mary Wilson) (1870)