Alfred Nobel and the Nobel Peace Prize
In 2010, I took a Nobel Literature class and thoroughly enjoyed it. Although it was a lot of work, I read several books that probably normally would never have considered
reading including Jean Paul Sartre's Nausea, Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, Gabriel Garcia
Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude,and Kenzaburo Oe's The Silent Cry. After reading these books, it made me want to read more selections from the literature prize list. Since then, I've read one or two authors from the list each year.
The history behind the Nobel Prize for literature is quite interesting and well worth perusing when you have the
time. Alfred
Nobel was Swedish and when he died, he requested the bulk of his
fortune be used to establish a prize which would be divided in 5 equal
parts.
Excerpt from his will:
"The whole of my remaining realizable estate shall be dealt with in the following way: the capital, invested in safe securities by my executors, shall constitute a fund, the interest on which shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind. The said interest shall be divided into five equal parts, which shall be apportioned as follows:
one part to the person who shall have made the most important discovery or invention within the field of physics;one part to the person who shall have made the most important chemical discovery or improvement;one part to the person who shall have made the most important discovery within the domain of physiology or medicine;one part to the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction;and one part to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.
The prizes for physics and chemistry shall be awarded by the Swedish Academy of Sciences; that for physiology or medical works by the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm; that for literature by the Academy in Stockholm, and that for champions of peace by a committee of five persons to be elected by the Norwegian Storting. It is my express wish that in awarding the prizes no consideration be given to the nationality of the candidates, but that the most worthy shall receive the prize, whether he be Scandinavian or not."
He
also specified who would be responsible for selecting the noble
laureates and for literature, the responsibility was given to the Swedish Academy.
A big question has always been how do you get nominated. Well, an
author cannot nominate himself. He must be nominated by what the
Academy considers a qualified person. Who is qualified?
- members of the Swedish Academy and of other academies, institutions and societies similar to it in membership and aims;
- professors of literary and linguistic disciplines at universities and university colleges;
- former Nobel Laureates in Literature;
- presidents of authors’ organisations which are representative of the literary activities of their respective countries.
Then
the academy gleans through the candidates, eventually narrows down the
nominations to a select few, reads their works and decides whom will win
the prize. The members of the Academy don't always agree and it seems
there have been some controversial and what some consider politically
motivated awards handed out to writers. Plus there has been controversy
regarding some of the authors who haven't won, whom some considered
better qualified. And then you have some authors who didn't want to
accept the prize because they considered it the death of their career.
And
you have a group of 18 people who are interpreting Nobel's words "the
person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most
outstanding work in an ideal direction." It depends entirely on their definition of ideal. The members of the academy are a diverse group of linguists, literary scholars and historians.
My
main thought while reading all this was where did the money come from.
Was Alfred Nobel independently wealthy, did he inherit the money
himself, where did all this money come from that is being used to fund
the prize? Long story short, in 1867 he invented Dynamite.
He had factories and laboratories in over 90 places in 20 different
countries. He had initially created dynamite to be used for mining and
because it ended up being used for purposes he never intended, he
created the Nobel Prize.
The Nobel Prize Winners in Literature
- Herta Müller
- Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio
- Doris Lessing
- Orhan Pamuk
- Harold Pinter
- Elfriede Jelinek
- J. M. Coetzee
- Imre Kertész
- V. S. Naipaul
- Gao Xingjian
- Günter Grass
- José Saramago
- Dario Fo
- Wislawa Szymborska
- Seamus Heaney
- Kenzaburo Oe
- Toni Morrison
- Derek Walcott
- Nadine Gordimer
- Octavio Paz
- Camilo José Cela
- Naguib Mahfouz
- Joseph Brodsky
- Wole Soyinka
- Claude Simon
- Jaroslav Seifert
- William Golding
- Gabriel García Márquez
- Elias Canetti
- Czeslaw Milosz
- Odysseus Elytis
- Isaac Bashevis Singer
- Vicente Aleixandre
- Saul Bellow
- Eugenio Montale
- Eyvind Johnson, Harry Martinson
- Patrick White
- Heinrich Böll
- Pablo Neruda
- Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
- Samuel Beckett
- Yasunari Kawabata
- Miguel Angel Asturias
- Shmuel Agnon, Nelly Sachs
- Mikhail Sholokhov
- Jean-Paul Sartre
- Giorgos Seferis
- John Steinbeck
- Ivo Andric
- Saint-John Perse
- Salvatore Quasimodo
- Boris Pasternak
- Albert Camus
- Juan Ramón Jiménez
- Halldór Laxness
- Ernest Hemingway
- Winston Churchill
- François Mauriac
- Pär Lagerkvist
- Bertrand Russell
- William Faulkner
- T.S. Eliot
- André Gide
- Hermann Hesse
- Gabriela Mistral
- Johannes V. Jensen
- No winner for war years 1940 to 1943 so the prize money was allocated to 1/3 to the
- Main fund and 2/3 to the special fund.
- Frans Eemil Sillanpää
- Pearl Buck
- Roger Martin du Gard
- Eugene O'Neill
- No winner
- Luigi Pirandello
- Ivan Bunin
- John Galsworthy
- Erik Axel Karlfeldt
- Sinclair Lewis
- Thomas Mann
- Sigrid Undset
- Henri Bergson
- Grazia Deledda
- George Bernard Shaw
- Wladyslaw Reymont
- William Butler Yeats
- Jacinto Benavente
- Anatole France
- Knut Hamsun
- Carl Spitteler
- The prize money was allocated to the Special Fund of this prize section
- Karl Gjellerup, Henrik Pontoppidan
- Verner von Heidenstam
- Romain Rolland
- The prize money was allocated to the Special Fund of this prize section
- Rabindranath Tagore
- Gerhart Hauptmann
- Maurice Maeterlinck
- Paul Heyse
- Selma Lagerlöf
- Rudolf Eucken
- Rudyard Kipling
- Giosuè Carducci
- Henryk Sienkiewicz
- Frédéric Mistral, José Echegaray
- Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson
- Theodor Mommsen
- Sully Prudhomme
If you haven't yet, that's okay. I'll be adding Nobel Prize for Literature as one of the main mini challenges for 2014.
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What I want to know is if you put in all those links yourself and how long it took you! That's a long list! I've only read 34 on the list.
ReplyDeleteFortunately Nobel site had a list I could copy and paste. Thank goodness!
DeleteHappy holidays, Robin!
ReplyDeleteI've read a handful on the list, and they seem so sad! No hope in life and all that. Do you know if any Christians have won?
ReplyDeleteMy link is definitely Christian: Clear Winter Nights is an unusual novel with a theme of ministering to doubting Christians. Highly recommended.