In 1909 the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the Swedish novelist Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf “in appreciation of the lofty idealism, vivid imagination and spiritual perception that characterize her writings.”
She was the first woman writer to be awarded the prize.
At the Nobel Banquet that year she said:
Deep within me, however, was a wondrous joy at receiving this Prize, and I tried to dispel my anxiety by thinking of those who would rejoice at my good fortune. There were my good friends, my brothers and sisters and, first and foremost, my old mother who, sitting back home, was happy to have lived to see this day.
But then I thought of my father and felt a deep sorrow that he should no longer be alive, and that I could not go to him and tell him that I had been...
When the Swedish Academy met in 1902 to decide who was to take the second Nobel Prize in Literature, there were, basically, two names on the short-list. Some members, of course, were keen to award the prize to Leo Tolstoy, but a majority in the Academy could not bring themselves to accept the Russian’s radical views. One of the Nobel judges criticized his “narrow-minded hostility to all forms of civilization.” Tolstoy died in 1910 without ever being recognised as a Nobel Laureate. In not receiving that accolade, Tolstoy remains in the distinguished company of many other writers who have been passed over - Graham Greene, Ibsen, Proust, Joyce, Strindberg, Conrad, Kafka, Virginia Woolf, DH Lawrence, Henry James, Zola, Hardy, Colette, Valery, Malraux, Nabokov and Rilke - to...
Doris Lessing has been awarded this year's Nobel Prize for Literature for her life's work over a 57-year career, including The Grass is Singing, The Golden Notebook and Memoirs of a Survivor. Lessing told BBC Radio "I've won it. I'm very pleased and now we're going to have a lot of speeches and flowers and it will be very nice. She recalled that, in the 1960s, "they sent one of their minions especially to tell me they didn't like me at the Nobel Prize and I would never get it. So now they've decided they're going to give it to me. So why? I mean, why do they like me any better now than they did then?" The author, who turns 88 on 22 October, said she thought she had become more respectable with age. They can't give a Nobel to someone who's dead so I think they were probably...
According to the BBC, "Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, who has faced charges of insulting his homeland, is awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize." Awarded by the Swedish Academy, the Literature Prize comes with a cheque for 10m kronor (£740,000).
The Nobel Prize site says Pamuk has "in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city ... discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of...
