Premiile Nobel Pentru Literatură 1984 - 2007

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https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists/all-nobel-prizes-
in-literature/?
sess=fff344a2de36ad15513392a114f5cdb7
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2018

The 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature has been postponed.

Kazuo Ishiguro “who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our
illusory sense of connection with the world”
Bob Dylan “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song
tradition”
Svetlana Alexievich “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our
time”
Patrick Modiano “for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human
destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation”
Alice Munro “master of the contemporary short story”
Mo Yan “who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary”
Tomas Tranströmer “because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh
access to reality”
Mario Vargas Llosa “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the
individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat”
Herta Müller “who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the
landscape of the dispossessed”
Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual
ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization”
The Nobel Prizes in Literature 2007 to 1984

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"that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has
subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny"
Photo: Scanpix/Ulrich Perrey

Doris Lessing
United Kingdom
b. 1919
(in Kermanshah, then Persia)
Biobibliographical Notes
Doris Lessing was born on 22 October 1919 to British parents in Kermanshah in what
was then known as Persia (now Iran) as Doris May Taylor. Her father, Alfred Cook
Taylor, formerly a captain in the British army during the First World War, was a bank
official. Her mother, Emily Maude Taylor, had been a nurse. In 1925 the family moved to
a farm in what was then Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) hoping to improve their
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income. Lessing described her childhood on the farm in the first part of her
autobiography, Under My Skin (1994). At the age of seven, she was sent to a convent
boarding school but later moved to a girls' school in Salisbury. When 14 she
independently ended her formal schooling. In the following years she worked as a young
nanny, telephonist, office worker, stenographer and journalist and had several short
stories published. In 1939 she married Frank Charles Wisdom with whom she had a son,
John, and a daughter, Jean. The couple divorced in 1943. In 1945 Doris married Gottfried
Lessing, a German-Jewish immigrant she had met in a Marxist group mainly concerned
with the race issue. She became involved with the Southern Rhodesian Labour Party. She
and Gottfried had a son, Peter. When the couple divorced in 1949, she took Peter and
moved to London, quickly establishing herself as a writer. Between 1952 and 1956 she
was a member of the British Communist Party and was active in the campaign against
nuclear weapons. Because of her criticism of the South African regime, she was
prohibited entry to that country between 1956 and 1995. After a brief visit to Southern
Rhodesia in 1956, she was banned there as well for the same reason. In African
Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe (1992) she described going back in 1982 to the
country where she had grown up. She now lives in London.
Doris Lessing made her debut as a novelist with The Grass is Singing (1950), which
examines the relationship between a white farmer's wife and her black servant. The book
is both a tragedy based in love-hatred and a study of unbridgeable racial conflicts.
Even the semi-autobiographical Children of Violence series, usually called the Martha
Quest series for its main character, is largely set in Africa. The series comprises Martha
Quest (1952), A Proper Marriage (1954), A Ripple from the Storm (1958), Landlocked
(1965) and The Four-Gated City (1969). It describes Martha Quest's awakening to greater
awareness on every level and was pioneering in its depiction of the mind and
circumstances of the emancipated woman. With these books Lessing created a modern
equivalent of the Bildungsroman of women writers of the 19th century. The Children of
Violence, despite its emphatic liberation theme, is characterised by an almost fatalistic
outlook. The story is told with the mild despair of someone seeing her younger self from
the heavens of an afterlife, unable to intervene. The masterpiece is the final volume of the
series, The Four-Gated City, a period frescoe apparently enveloping all of England –
indeed our entire culture – illuminated by the author’s empathy and incivility.
The Golden Notebook (1962) was Doris Lessing’s real breakthrough. The burgeoning
feminist movement saw it as a pioneering work and it belongs to the handful of books
that informed the 20th-century view of the male-female relationship. It used a more
complex narrative technique to reveal how political and emotion conflicts are
intertwined. The style levels of differing documents and experiences mix: newspaper
cuttings, news items, films, dreams and diaries. Anna Wulf, the main character, has five
notebooks for her thoughts about Africa, politics and the communist party, her
relationship to men and sex, Jungian analysis and dream interpretation. The disjointed
form reflects that of the main character's mind. There is no single perspective from which
to capture the entirety of her life experience.
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Books published in the 1970s included Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971), inspired
by R. D. Laing. Lessing has characterised her novel from this period as "inner-space
fiction": an attempt in the spirit of Romanticism to expand human knowledge to
encompass regions beyond the control of reason and the ego.
In the novel series Canopus in Argos: Archives (vol. 1–5, 1979–1984) Lessing expanded
the science fiction genre. The series studies the post-atomic war development of the
human species. Lessing varies thoughts about colonialism, nuclear war and ecological
disaster with observations on the opposition between female and male principles. Among
inspirations for the work was the Idries Shah’s school of Sufism that she discovered in
the 1960s. Doris Lessing revisited her interest in Sufism in the Time Bites (2004)
collection of essays.
Lessing returned to realistic narrative in The Good Terrorist (1985), providing a satirical
picture of the need of the contemporary left for total control and the female protagonist’s
misdirected martyrdom and subjugation. Her analysis of the greenhouse for the terrorist
mind in generation hatred and an Übermensch attitude retains currency.
The autobiographical Under My Skin (1994) and Walking in the Shade (1997) represented
a new peak in her writing. Lessing recalls not only her own life but the entire epoch:
England in the last days of the empire. Her novel The Sweetest Dream (2001) is a stand-
alone sequel in fictive form. Perhaps her unsparing view of the polical antics of friends
and lovers necessitated such discretion.
Her other important novels are The Summer Before the Dark (1973) and The Fifth Child
(1988). In the former, the reader at first infers a liberation motif: a woman finally about to
fulfil her gift and sexual desires. After a first reading, the contours of the real novel take
shape: a ruthless study of the collapse of values in middle age. The Fifth Child is a
masterfully realised psychological thriller, where a woman’s repressed or denied
aggression against family life is incarnated in a monstrous boy child.
The vision of global catastrophe forcing mankind to return to a more primitive life has
had special appeal for Doris Lessing. It reappears in some of her books of recent years:
the fantasy novel Mara and Dann (1999) and its sequel The Story of General Dann and
Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog (2005). From collapse and chaos emerge the
elementary qualities that allow Lessing to retain hope in humanity.
Literary Prizes: Somerset Maugham Award (1954), Prix Médicis étranger (1976),
Österreichischer Staatspreis für Europäische Literatur (1981), Shakespeare-Preis der
Alfred Toepfer Stiftung F. V. S., Hamburg (1982), W. H. Smith Literary Award (1986),
Palermo Prize (1987), Premio Internazionale Mondello (1987), Premio Grinzane Cavour
(1989), James Tait Black Memorial Book Prize (1995), Los Angeles Times Book Prize
(1995), Premio Internacional Catalunya (1999), David Cohen British Literary Prize
(2001), Companion of Honour from the Royal Society of Literature (2001), Premio
Principe de Asturias (2001), S.T. Dupont Golden PEN Award (2002).
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Works in English
The Grass is Singing. – London : M. Joseph, 1950 ; New York : Crowell, 1950
This was the Old Chief's Country. – London : M. Joseph, 1951 ; New York : Crowell,
1952
Martha Quest. – London : M. Joseph, 1952. – (Children of Violence; 1)
Five : Short Novels. – London : M. Joseph, 1953
A Proper Marriage. – London : M. Joseph, 1954. – (Children of Violence; 2)
A Retreat to Innocence. – London : M. Joseph, 1956 ; New York : Prometheus, 1959
The Habit of Loving. – London : MacGibbon & Kee, 1957 ; New York : Crowell, 1958
Going Home. – London : M. Joseph, 1957 ; New York : Ballantine, 1968
A Ripple from the Storm. – London : M. Joseph, 1958 ; New York : Simon & Schuster,
1966. – (Children of Violence; 3)
Fourteen Poems. – Northwood : Scorpion Press, 1959
In Pursuit of the English : a Documentary. – London : MacGibbon & Kee, 1960 ; New
York : Simon & Schuster, 1961
Play with a Tiger : a Play in Three Acts. – London : M. Joseph, 1962
The Golden Notebook. – London : M. Joseph, 1962 ; New York : Simon & Schuster, 1962
A Man and Two Women. – London : MacGibbon & Kee, 1963 ; New York : Simon &
Schuster, 1963
Martha Quest and A Proper Marriage. – New York : Simon & Schuster, 1964
African Stories. – London : M. Joseph, 1964 ; New York : Simon & Schuster, 1965
Landlocked. – London : MacGibbon & Kee, 1965 ; New York : Simon & Schuster, 1966.
– (Children of Violence; 4)
A Ripple from the Storm and Landlocked. – New York : Simon & Schuster, 1966
The Black Madonna. – London : Panther, 1966
Winter in July. – London : Panther, 1966
Particularly Cats. – London : M. Joseph, 1967 ; New York : Simon & Schuster, 1967
The Four-Gated City. – London : MacGibbon & Kee, 1969 ; New York : Knopf, 1969. –
(Children of Violence; 5)
Briefing for a Descent into Hell. – London : Cape, 1971 ; New York : Knopf, 1971
The Story of a Non-Marrying Man and Other Stories. – London : Cape, 1972. – Republ.
as The Temptation of Jack Orkney and Other Stories. – New York : Knopf, 1972
Collected African stories. Vol. 1, This was the Old Chief's Country. – London : M. Joseph,
1973
Collected African stories. Vol. 2, The Sun Between Their Feet. – London : M. Joseph,
1973
The Summer Before the Dark. – London : Cape, 1973 ; New York : Knopf, 1973
The Memoirs of a Survivor. – London : Octagon, 1974 ; New York : Knopf, 1975
Stories. – New York : Knopf, 1978
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To Room Nineteen : Collected Stories Volume One. – London : Cape, 1978

The Temptation of Jack Orkney : Collected Stories Volume Two. – London : Cape, 1978
Shikasta : Re: Colonised Planet 5. – London : Cape, 1979 ; New York : Knopf, 1979. –
(Canopus in Argos: Archives; 1)
The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five. – London : Cape, 1980 ; New York :
Knopf, 1980. – (Canopus in Argos: Archives; 2)
The Sirian Experiments. – London : Cape, 1981 ; New York : Knopf, 1981. – (Canopus in
Argos: Archives; 3)
The Making of the Representative for Planet 8. – London : Cape, 1982 ; New York :
Knopf, 1982. – (Canopus in Argos: Archives; 4)
Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire. – London : Cape,
1983 ; New York : Knopf, 1983. – (Canopus in Argos: Archives; 5)
The Diary of a Good Neighbour. – London : M. Joseph, 1983 ; New York : Knopf, 1983
If the Old Could ... – London: M. Joseph, 1984 ; New York : Knopf, 1984
The Diaries of Jane Somers. – London : M. Joseph, 1984 ; New York : Knopf, 1984
The Good Terrorist. – London : Cape, 1985 ; New York : Knopf, 1985
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside. – London : Cape, 1987 ; New York : Harper & Row,
1987
The Wind Blows Away Our Words. – London : Picador, 1987 ; New York : Vintage, 1987
The Fifth Child. – London : Cape, 1988 ; New York : Knopf, 1988
The Real Thing : Stories and Sketches. – Republ. as London Observed : Stories and
Sketches. – London : HarperCollins, 1992
African Laughter : Four Visits to Zimbabwe. – London & New York : HarperCollins, 1992
Shadows on the Wall of the Cave : a talk by Doris Lessing delivered 19 January 1994. –
London : The British Library, 1994
Conversations / edited by Earl G. Ingersol. – Princeton, N.J. : Ontario Review Press, 1994
A Small Personal Voice : Essays, Reviews, Interviews / Edited by Paul Schlueter. –
London : Flamingo (HarperCollins), 1994
Under My Skin : Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949. – London & New York :
HarperCollins, 1994
Spies I Have Known and Other Stories. – Glasgow : Collins Educational, 1995
Playing the Game. – London : HarperCollins, 1995
Love, Again. – London : Flamingo, 1996 ; New York : HarperCollins, 1996
Play with a Tiger, and Other Plays. – London : Flamingo, 1996
Walking in the Shade : Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949-1962. – London & New
York : HarperCollins, 1997
Mara and Dann : an Adventure. – London & New York : HarperCollins, 1999
Ben, in the World. – London & New York : HarperCollins, 2000
The Sweetest Dream. – London : Flamingo (HarperCollins), 2001 ; New York :
HarperCollins, 2002
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On Cats. – London : Flamingo (HarperCollins), 2002

The Grandmothers : Four Short Novels. – London : Flamingo (HarperCollins), 2003 ;
New York : HarperCollins, 2004
Time Bites : Views and Reviews. – London : Fourth Estate, 2004 ; New York :
HarperCollins, 2004
The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog. – London :
Fourth Estate (HarperCollins), 2005 ; New York : HarperCollins, 2006
The Cleft. – London : Fourth Estate (HarperCollins), 2007 ; New York : HarperCollins,
2007

"who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols
for the clash and interlacing of cultures"
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Photo: U. Montan
Orhan Pamuk
Turkey
b. 1952
Orhan Pamuk was born 7 June 1952 in Istanbul into a prosperous, secular middle-class
family. His father was an engineer as were his paternal uncle and grandfather. It was this
grandfather who founded the family's fortune. Growing up, Pamuk was set on becoming
a painter. He graduated from Robert College then studied architecture at Istanbul
Technical University and journalism at Istanbul University. He spent the years 1985-1988
in the United States where he was a visiting researcher at Columbia University in New
York and for a short period attached to the University of Iowa. He lives in Istanbul.
Pamuk has said that growing up, he experienced a shift from a traditional Ottoman family
environment to a more Western-oriented lifestyle. He wrote about this in his first
published novel, a family chronicle entitled Cevdet Bey Ve Oğulları (1982), which in the
spirit of Thomas Mann follows the development of a family over three generations.
His second novel, Sessiz Ev (1983; The House of Silence, 1998), uses five different
narrator perspectives to describe a situation in which several family members visit their
ageing grandmother at a popular seaside resort with Turkey teetering on the brink of civil
war. The period is 1980. The grandchildren's political discussions and their friendships
reflect a social chaos where various extremist organisations vie for power.
Pamuk's international breakthrough came with his third novel, Beyaz Kale (1985; The
White Castle, 1992). It is structured as an historical novel set in 17th-century Istanbul, but
its content is primarily a story about how our ego builds on stories and fictions of
different sorts. Personality is shown to be a variable construction. The story's main
character, a Venetian sold as a slave to the young scholar Hodja, finds in Hodja his own
reflection. As the two men recount their life stories to each other, there occurs an
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exchange of identities. It is perhaps, on a symbolic level, the European novel captured

then allied with an alien culture.
Pamuk's writing has become known for its play with identities and doubles. The issue
appears in his novel Kara Kitap (1990; The Black Book, 1995) in which the protagonist
searches the hubbub of Istanbul for his vanished wife and her half-brother, with whom he
later exchanges identities. Frequent references to the mystic tradition of the East make it
natural to see this in a Sufi perspective. Kara Kitap represented a definite break with the
governing social realism in Turkish literature. It provoked debate in Turkey not least
through its Sufism references. Pamuk based his screenplay for the film Gizli Yüz (1992)
on the novel.
Yeni Hayat (1994; The New Life, 1996) is a novel about a secret book with the capacity to
irrevocably change the life of any person who reads it. The search for the book provides
the structure of a physical journey but bordered by literary references, thought
experiments in the spirit of mysticism, and reminiscences of older Turkish popular
culture, turning the plot into an allegoric course of events correlated with the Romantic
myth of an original, lost wisdom.
According to the author, the major theme of Benim Adim Kırmızı (2000; My Name is
Red, 2002) is the relationship between East and West, describing the different views on
the artist's relation to his work in both cultures. It is a story about classical miniature
painting and simultaneously a murder mystery in a period environment, a bitter-sweet
love story, and a subtle dialectic discussion of the role of individuality in art.
Pamuk has published a collection of essays, Öteki Renkler : Seçme Yazılar Ve Bir Hikâye
(1999), and a city portrait, İstanbul : Hatıralar Ve Şehir (2003; Istanbul : Memories and
the City, 2006). The latter interweaves recollections of the writer's upbringing with a
portrayal of Istanbul's literary and cultural history. A key word is hüzün, a multi-faceted
concept Pamuk uses to characterise the melancholy he sees as distinctive for Istanbul and
its inhabitants.
Pamuk's latest novel is Kar (2002; Snow, 2005). The story is set in the 1990s near
Turkey's eastern border in the town of Kars, once a border city between the Ottoman and
Russian empires. The protagonist, a writer who has been living in exile in Frankfurt,
travels to Kars to discover himself and his country. The novel becomes a tale of love and
poetic creativity just as it knowledgeably describes the political and religious conflicts
that characterise Turkish society of our day.
In his home country, Pamuk has a reputation as a social commentator even though he sees
himself as principally a fiction writer with no political agenda. He was the first author in
the Muslim world to publicly condemn the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. He took a
stand for his Turkish colleague Yaşar Kemal when Kemal was put on trial in 1995.
Pamuk himself was charged after having mentioned, in a Swiss newspaper, that 30,000
Kurds and one million Armenians were killed in Turkey. The charge aroused widespread
international protest. It has subsequently been dropped.
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Literary Prizes and Awards: Milliyet Roman Yarışması Ödülü (1979, shared with Mehmet
Eroğlu), Orhan Kemal Roman Ödülü (1983), Madaralı roman Ödülü (1984), the
Independent Award for Foreign Fiction (1990), Prix de la Découverte Européenne (1991),
Prix France Culture (1995), Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (2002), Premio Grinzane
Cavour (2002), the IMPAC Dublin Award (2003), Ricarda-Huch-Preis (2005), Der
Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (2005), Prix Médicis étranger (2005), Prix
Méditerranée Étranger (2006).
Works in English
The White Castle / translated from the Turkish by Victoria Holbrook. – New York :
Braziller, 1991 ; London : Faber & Faber, 2001. – Translation of Beyaz Kale
The Black Book / translated by: Güneli Gün. – New York : Farrar, Straus, 1994 ; London :
Faber & Faber, 1994. – Translation of Kara Kitap
The Black Book / translated by: Maureen Freely. – New York : Knopf, 2006 ; London :
Faber & Faber, 2006. – Translation of Kara Kitap
The New Life / translated by Güneli Gün. – New York : Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1997 ;
London : Faber & Faber, 1997. – Translation of Yeni Hayat
My Name is Red / translated from the Turkish by Erdağ M. Göknar. – New York : Knopf,
2001 ; London : Faber & Faber, 2001. – Translation of Benim Adım Kırmızı
Snow / translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely. – New York : Knopf, 2004 ;
London : Faber & Faber, 2004. – Translation of Kar
Istanbul : Memories and the City / translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely. – New
York : Knopf, 2005 ; London : Faber & Faber, 2005. – Translation of İstanbul : Hatıralar
Ve Şehir

"who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into
oppression's closed rooms"
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Photo: U. Montan
Harold Pinter
United Kingdom
b. 1930
Harold Pinter was born on 10 October 1930 in the London borough of Hackney, son of a
Jewish dressmaker. Growing up, Pinter was met with the expressions of anti-Semitism,
and has indicated its importance for his becoming a dramatist. At the outbreak of the
Second World War, he was evacuated from London at the age of nine, returning when
twelve. He has said that the experience of wartime bombing has never lost its hold on
him. Back in London, he attended Hackney Grammar School where he played Macbeth
and Romeo among other characters in productions directed by Joseph Brearley. This
prompted him to choose a career in acting. In 1948 he was accepted at the Royal
Academy of Dramatic Art. In 1950, he published his first poems. In 1951 he was
accepted at the Central School of Speech and Drama. That same year, he won a place in
Anew McMaster's famous Irish repertory company, renowned for its performances of
Shakespeare. Pinter toured again between 1954 and 1957, using the stage name of David
Baron. Between 1956 and 1980 he was married to actor Vivien Merchant. In 1980 he
married the author and historian Lady Antonia Fraser.
Pinter made his playwriting debut in 1957 with The Room, presented in Bristol. Other
early plays were The Birthday Party (1957), at first a fiasco of legendary dimensions but
later one of his most performed plays, and The Dumb Waiter (1957). His conclusive
breakthrough came with The Caretaker (1959), followed by The Homecoming (1964) and
other plays.
Harold Pinter is generally seen as the foremost representative of British drama in the
second half of the 20th century. That he occupies a position as a modern classic is
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illustrated by his name entering the language as an adjective used to describe a particular
atmosphere and environment in drama: "Pinteresque".
Pinter restored theatre to its basic elements: an enclosed space and unpredictable
dialogue, where people are at the mercy of each other and pretence crumbles. With a
minimum of plot, drama emerges from the power struggle and hide-and-seek of
interlocution. Pinter's drama was first perceived as a variation of absurd theatre, but has
later more aptly been characterised as "comedy of menace", a genre where the writer
allows us to eavesdrop on the play of domination and submission hidden in the most
mundane of conversations. In a typical Pinter play, we meet people defending themselves
against intrusion or their own impulses by entrenching themselves in a reduced and
controlled existence. Another principal theme is the volatility and elusiveness of the past.
It is said of Harold Pinter that following an initial period of psychological realism he

proceeded to a second, more lyrical phase with plays such as Landscape (1967) and
Silence (1968) and finally to a third, political phase with One for the Road (1984),
Mountain Language (1988), The New World Order (1991) and other plays. But this
division into periods seems oversimplified and ignores some of his strongest writing,
such as No Man's Land (1974) and Ashes to Ashes (1996). In fact, the continuity in his
work is remarkable, and his political themes can be seen as a development of the early
Pinter's analysing of threat and injustice.
Since 1973, Pinter has won recognition as a fighter for human rights, alongside his
writing. He has often taken stands seen as controversial. Pinter has also written radio
plays and screenplays for film and television. Among his best-known screenplays are
those for The Servant (1963), The Accident (1967), The Go-Between (1971) and The
French Lieutenant's Woman (1981, based on the John Fowles novel). Pinter has also
made a pioneering contribution as a director.
This bibliography includes published works only.
Works in English
1. Plays (year of writing; year of publication; year of first performance)
The Room (1957). – in The Birthday Party, and Other Plays. – London : Methuen, 1960. –
(Bristol, 1957)
The Birthday Party (1957). – in The Birthday Party, and Other Plays. – London :
Methuen, 1960. – (Arts Theatre, Cambridge, 28 April 1958)
The Dumb Waiter (1957). – in The Birthday Party, and Other Plays. – London : Methuen,
1960. – (Kleines Haus, Frankfurt, February 1959)
A Slight Ache (1958). – in A Slight Ache and Other Plays. – London : Methuen, 1961. –
(Broadcast 1959)
The Hothouse (1958). – in The Hothouse. – London : Eyre Methuen, 1980. – (Hampstead
Theatre, London, 24 April 1980)
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The Caretaker (1959). – in The Caretaker. – London : Methuen, 1960. – (Arts Theatre,
London, 27 April 1960)
A Night Out (1959). – in Slight Ache and Other Plays. – London : Methuen, 1961. –
(Broadcast on the BBC Third Programme, 1 March 1960)
Night School (1960). – in Tea Party and Other Plays. – London : Methuen, 1967. –
(Broadcast on Associated Rediffusion Television, 21 July 1960)
The Dwarfs (1960). – in Slight Ache and Other Plays. – London : Methuen, 1961. –
(Broadcast 1960; New Arts Theatre, London, 18 September 1963)
The Collection (1961). – in The Collection. – London : French, 1963 (1962?) ; in The
Collection, and The Lover. – London : Methuen, 1963. – (Televised 1961)
The Lover (1962). – in The Collection, and The Lover. – London : Methuen, 1963. –
(Televised 1961)
Tea Party (1964). – in Tea Party and Other Plays. – London : Methuen, 1967. – (Eastside
Playhouse, New York, October 1968)
The Homecoming (1964). – in The Homecoming. – London : Methuen, 1965. – (Aldwych
Theatre, London, 3 June 1965)
The Basement (1966). – in Tea Party and Other Plays. – London : Methuen, 1967. –
(Televised 1967)
Landscape (1967). – in Landscape. – London : Pendragon Press, 1968 ; in Landscape,
and Silence. – London : Methuen, 1969. – (Broadcast 1968)
Silence (1968). – in Landscape, and Silence. – London : Methuen, 1969. – (Aldwych
Theatre, London, 2 July 1969)
Old Times (1970). – in Old Times. – London : Methuen, 1971. – (Aldwych Theatre,
London, 1 June 1971)
Monologue (1972). – in Monologue. – London : Covent Garden Press, 1973. – (Televised
on the BBC Television, 13 April 1973)
No Man's Land (1974). – in No Man's Land. – London : Methuen, 1975. – (Old Vic,
London 23 April, 1975)
Betrayal (1978). – in Betrayal. – London : Eyre Methuen, 1978. – (National Theatre,
London, November 1978)
Family Voices (1980). – in Family Voices. – London : Next Editions, 1981. – (Broadcast
on Radio 3, 22 January 1981)
Other Places (1982). – in Other Places : Three Plays. – London : Methuen, 1982. –
(Cottesloe Theatre, London, October 1982)
A Kind of Alaska (1982). – in A Kind of Alaska. – London : French, 1982 ; in Other
Places : Three Plays. – London : Methuen, 1982. – (Cottesloe Theatre, London, October
1982)
Victoria Station (1982). – in Victoria Station. – London : French, 1982 ; in Other Places :
Three Plays. – London : Methuen, 1982. – (Cottesloe Theatre, London, October 1982)
One for the Road (1984). – in One for the Road. – London : Methuen, 1984. – (Lyric
Theatre Studio, Hammersmith, March 1984)
Mountain Language (1988). – in Mountain Language. – London : French, 1988 ; in
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Mountain Language. – London : Faber, 1988. – (National Theatre, London, 20 October

1988)
The New World Order (1991). – in Granta (no 37), Autumn 1991. – (Royal Court Theatre
Upstairs, London, 19 July 1991)
Party Time (1991). – in Party Time. – London : Faber, 1991. – (Almeida Theatre, London,
31 October 1991)
Moonlight (1993). – in Moonlight. – London : Faber, 1993. – (Almeida Theatre, London,
7 September 1993)
Ashes to Ashes (1996). – in Ashes to Ashes. – London : Faber, 1996. – (Royal Court at the
Ambassadors Theatre, London, 12 September 1996)
Celebration (1999). – in Celebration. – London : Faber, 2000. – (Almeida Theatre,
London, 16 March 2000)
Remembrance of Things Past (2000). – in Remembrance of Things Past. – London :
Faber, 2000. – (Cottesloe Theatre, London, 23 November, 2000)
2. Additional
The Proust Screenplay : À la recherche du temps perdu / by Harold Pinter, with the
collaboration of Joseph Losey and Barbara Bray. – New York : Grove Press, 1977
Poems and Prose 1949 –1977. – London : Methuen, 1978
The Dwarfs : a novel. – London : Faber, 1990
Various Voices : Poetry, Prose, Politics, 1948–1998. – London : Faber, 1998
Collected Screenplays. 1. – London : Faber, 2000. – Content : The Servant, The Pumpkin
Eater, The Quiller Memorandum, The Accident, The Last Tycoon, Langrishe Go Down
Collected Screenplays. 2. – London : Faber, 2000. – Content : The Go-Between ; The
Proust Screenplay ; Victory ; Turtle Diary ; Reunion
Collected Screenplays. 3. – London : Faber, 2000. – Content : The French Lieutenant's
Woman ; The Heat of the Day ; The Comfort of Strangers ; The Trial ; The Dreaming
Child
The Disappeared and Other Poems. – London : Enitharmon, 2002
Press Conference. – London : Faber, 2002
War : [Eight Poems and One Speech]. – London : Faber, 2003

15
"for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with
extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating
power"
Elfriede Jelinek
Austria
b. 1946
Elfriede Jelinek was born on 20 October 1946 in the town of Mürzzuschlag in the
Austrian province of Styria. Her father, of Czech-Jewish origin, was a chemist and
worked in strategically important industrial production during the Second World War,
thereby escaping persecution. Her mother was from a prosperous Vienna family, and
Elfriede grew up and went to school in that city. At an early age, she was instructed in
piano, organ and recorder and went on to study composition at the Vienna Conservatory.
After graduating from the Albertsgymnasium in 1964, she studied theatre and art history
at the University of Vienna while continuing her music studies. In 1971, she passed the
organist diploma examination at the Conservatory.
Elfriede Jelinek began writing poetry while still young. She made her literary debut with
the collection Lisas Schatten in 1967. Through contact with the student movement, her
writing took a socially critical direction. In 1970 came her satirical novel wir sind
lockvögel baby!. In common with her next novel, Michael. Ein Jugendbuch für die
Infantilgesellschaft (1972), it had a character of linguistic rebellion, aimed at popular
culture and its mendacious presentation of the good life.
After a few years spent in Berlin and Rome in the early 1970s, Jelinek married Gottfried
Hüngsberg, and divided her time between Vienna and Munich. She conquered the
German literary public with her novels Die Liebhaberinnen (1975; Women as Lovers,
1994), Die Ausgesperrten (1980; Wonderful, Wonderful Times, 1990) and the
autobiographically based Die Klavierspielerin (1983; The Piano Teacher, 1988), in 2001
16
made into an acclaimed film by Michael Haneke. These novels, each within the
framework of its own problem complex, present a pitiless world where the reader is
confronted with a locked-down regime of violence and submission, hunter and prey.
Jelinek demonstrates how the entertainment industry’s clichés seep into people’s
consciousness and paralyse opposition to class injustices and gender oppression. In Lust
(1989; Lust, 1992), Jelinek lets her social analysis swell to fundamental criticism of
civilisation by describing sexual violence against women as the actual template for our
culture. This line is maintained, seemingly in a lighter tone, in Gier. Ein
Unterhaltungsroman (2000), a study in the cold-blooded practice of male power. With
special fervour, Jelinek has castigated Austria, depicting it as a realm of death in her
phantasmagorical novel, Die Kinder der Toten (1995). Jelinek is a highly controversial
figure in her homeland. Her writing builds on a lengthy Austrian tradition of linguistically
sophisticated social criticism, with precursors such as Johann Nepomuk Nestroy, Karl
Kraus, Ödön von Horváth, Elias Canetti, Thomas Bernhard and the Wiener Group.
The nature of Jelinek’s texts is often hard to define. They shift between prose and poetry,
incantation and hymn, they contain theatrical scenes and filmic sequences. The primacy
in her writing has however moved from novel-writing to drama. Her first radio play,
wenn die sonne sinkt ist für manche schon büroschluss, was very favourably received in
1974. She has since written a large number of pieces for radio and the theatre, in which
she successively abandoned traditional dialogues for a kind of polyphonic monologues
that do not serve to delineate roles but to permit voices from various levels of the psyche
and history to be heard simultaneously. What she puts on stage in plays from recent years
– Totenauberg, Raststätte, Wolken. Heim, Ein Sportstück, In den Alpen, Das Werk and
others – are less characters than “language interfaces” confronting each other. Jelinek’s
most recent published works for drama, the so-called “princess dramas” (Der Tod und
das Mädchen I–V, 2003), are variations on one of the writer’s basic themes, the inability
of women to fully come to life in a world where they are painted over with stereotypical
images.
Jelinek has translated others’ works (Thomas Pynchon, Georges Feydeau, Eugène
Labiche, Christopher Marlowe) and has also written film scripts and an opera libretto.
Alongside her literary writing she has made a reputation as a dauntless polemicist with a
website always poised to comment on burning issues.
Literary Prizes and Awards: The Young Austrian Culture Week Poetry and Prose Prize
(1969), the Austrian University Students’ Poetry Prize (1969), the Austrian State
Literature Stipendium (1972), the City of Stadt Bad Gandersheim’s Roswitha Memorial
Medal (1978), The West German Interior Ministry Prize for Film Writing (1979), the
West German Ministry of Education and Art Appreciation Prize (1983), the City of
Cologne Heinrich Böll Prize (1986), the Province of Styria Literature Prize (1987), the
City of Vienna Literature Appreciation Prize (1989), the City of Aachen Walter
Hasenclever Prize (1994), the City of Bochum Peter Weiss Prize (1994), the Bremer
Literature Prize (1996), the Georg Büchner Prize (1998), the Berlin Theatre Prize (2002),
the City of Düsseldorf Heinrich Heine Prize (2002), the Mülheimer Theatre Prize (2002,
2004), the Else Lasker Schüler Prize (for her entire dramatic work), Mainz (2003), the
17
Lessing Critics’ Prize, Wolfenbüttel (2004), the Stig Dagerman Prize, Älvkarleby (2004),
The Blind War Veterans’ Radio Theatre Prize, Berlin (2004).
Works in English
The Piano Teacher : a Novel / translated from the German by Joachim Neugroschel. –
New York : Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988. – Translation of Die Klavierspielerin
Wonderful, Wonderful Times : [novel] / translated by Michael Hulse. – London : Serpent's
Tail, 1990. – Translation of Die Ausgesperrten
Lust : [novel] / translated by Michael Hulse. – London : Serpent's Tail, 1992. – Translation
of Lust
Women as Lovers : [novel] / translated by Martin Chalmers. – London : Serpent's Tail,
1994. – Translation of Die Liebhaberinnen

"who in innumerable guises portrays the surprising involvement of the outsider"
John M. Coetzee
18
South Africa
b. 1940
John Maxwell Coetzee was born in Cape Town, South Africa, on 9 February 1940, the
elder of two children. His mother was a primary school teacher. His father was trained as
an attorney, but practiced as such only intermittently; during the years 1941–45 he served
with the South African forces in North Africa and Italy. Though Coetzee's parents were
not of British descent, the language spoken at home was English.
Coetzee received his primary schooling in Cape Town and in the nearby town of
Worcester. For his secondary education he attended a school in Cape Town run by a
Catholic order, the Marist Brothers. He matriculated in 1956.
Coetzee entered the University of Cape Town in 1957, and in 1960 and 1961 graduated
successively with honours degrees in English and mathematics. He spent the years 1962–
65 in England, working as a computer programmer while doing research for a thesis on
the English novelist Ford Madox Ford.
In 1963 he married Philippa Jubber (1939–1991). They had two children, Nicolas (1966–
1989) and Gisela (b. 1968).
In 1965 Coetzee entered the graduate school of the University of Texas at Austin, and in
1968 graduated with a PhD in English, linguistics, and Germanic languages. His doctoral
dissertation was on the early fiction of Samuel Beckett.
For three years (1968–71) Coetzee was assistant professor of English at the State
University of New York in Buffalo. After an application for permanent residence in the
United States was denied, he returned to South Africa. From 1972 until 2000 he held a
series of positions at the University of Cape Town, the last of them as Distinguished
Professor of Literature.
Between 1984 and 2003 he also taught frequently in the United States: at the State
University of New York, Johns Hopkins University, Harvard University, Stanford
University, and the University of Chicago, where for six years he was a member of the
Committee on Social Thought.
Coetzee began writing fiction in 1969. His first book, Dusklands, was published in South
Africa in 1974. In the Heart of the Country (1977) won South Africa’s then principal
literary award, the CNA Prize, and was published in Britain and the USA. Waiting for the
Barbarians (1980) received international notice. His reputation was confirmed by Life &
Times of Michael K (1983), which won Britain's Booker Prize. It was followed by Foe
(1986), Age of Iron (1990), The Master of Petersburg (1994), and Disgrace (1999),
which again won the Booker Prize.
19
Coetzee also wrote two fictionalized memoirs, Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002). The
Lives of Animals (1999) is a fictionalized lecture, later absorbed into Elizabeth Costello
(2003). White Writing (1988) is a set of essays on South African literature and culture.
Doubling the Point (1992) consists of essays and interviews with David Attwell. Giving
Offense (1996) is a study of literary censorship. Stranger Shores (2001) collects his later
literary essays.
Coetzee has also been active as a translator of Dutch and Afrikaans literature.
In 2002 Coetzee emigrated to Australia. He lives with his partner Dorothy Driver in
Adelaide, South Australia, where he holds an honorary position at the University of
Adelaide.
Works in English
Dusklands : [two novellas]. – Johannesburg : Ravan Press, 1974. – Contents: The Vietnam
project ; The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee
In the Heart of the Country : [novel]. – London : Secker & Warburg, 1977. – Published in
the USA as From the Heart of the Country
Waiting for the Barbarians : [novel]. – London : Secker & Warburg, 1980
Life and Times of Michael K : [novel]. – London : Secker & Warburg, 1983
Foe : [novel]. – London : Secker & Warburg, 1986
White Writing : on the Culture of Letters in South Africa. – New Haven : Yale Univ. Press,
1988
Age of Iron : [novel]. – London : Secker & Warburg, 1990
Doubling the Point : Essays and Interviews. – Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard Univ. Press,
1992
The Master of Petersburg : [novel]. – London : Secker & Warburg, 1994
Giving Offense : Essays on Censorship. – Chicago : Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996
Boyhood : Scenes from Provincial Life. – London : Secker & Warburg, 1997
What is Realism? – Bennington, Vt. : Bennington College, 1997
Disgrace : [novel]. – London : Secker & Warburg, 1999
The Lives of Animals / edited and introduced by Amy Gutmann. – Princeton : Princeton
Univ. Press, 1999
The Humanities in Africa = Die Geisteswissenschaften in Afrika. – München : Carl
Friedrich von Siemens-Stiftung, 2001
Stranger Shores : Essays, 1986–1999. – London : Secker & Warburg, 2001
Youth. – London : Secker & Warburg, 2002
Elizabeth Costello : Eight Lessons. – London : Secker & Warburg, 2003
Lecture and Speech of Acceptance, upon the Award of the Nobel Prize, Delivered in
Stockholm in December 2003. – New York : Penguin Books, 2004.*
Slow Man : [novel]. - Secker & Warburg, 2005 (sept.) *
20

"for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric
arbitrariness of history"
Imre Kertész
Hungary
b. 1929
21
Imre Kertész was born in Budapest on 9 th November 1929. He is of Jewish descent.

1944 he was deported to Auschwitz and from there to Buchenwald, where he was
liberated in 1945. On his return to Hungary he worked from 1948 for a Budapest
newspaper, Világosság, but was dismissed in 1951, when it adopted the party line. After
two years of military service he has since supported himself as an independent writer and
translator of German authors such as Nietzsche, Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler, Freud, Roth,
Wittgenstein and Canetti, who have all had significance for his own writing.
In 1975 Kertész’s first novel, Sorstalanság (Fateless, 1992), was published, a work based
on his experiences in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. He has himself said, “When I am
thinking about a new novel, I always think of Auschwitz.” This does not mean, however,
that Sorstalanság is autobiographical in any simple sense: Kertész says himself that he
has used the form of the autobiographical novel but that it is not autobiography. Initially
Sorstalanság was refused. When eventually it was published in 1975 it was received with
compact silence. Kertész has written about this experience in A kudarc (“Fiasco”), 1988.
This novel is normally regarded as the second volume in a trilogy that began with
Sorstalanság and of which the third volume is Kaddis a meg nem született gyermekért,
1990 (Kaddish for a Child not Born, 1997). Kaddish is the name of the Jewish prayer for
their dead. In Kaddis a meg nem született gyermekért the protagonist of Sorstalanság and
A kudarc, György Köves, reappears. His Kaddish is said for the child which he refuses to
beget in a world that permitted the existence of Auschwitz. Other prose works are A
nyomkereső (“The pathfinder”), 1977, and Az angol labogó (“The English flag”), 1991.
In 1992 Gályanapló (“Galley Diary”), a diary in fictional form, was published. This
covers the years 1961–1991. Valaki más : a változás krónikája (“I – Another : chronicle
of a metamorphosis"), 1997, continues this inner monologue in the form of notes made
during the years 1991–1995. After the political upheavals of 1989, Kertész was able to
make more public appearances. His lectures and essays have been collected in A
holocaust mint kultúra (“The Holocaust as Culture”), 1993, A gondolatnyi csend, amíg
kivégzőoztag újratölt (“Moments of silence while the execution squad reloads”), 1998,
and A száműzött nyelv (“The exiled language”), 2001.
Kertész was awarded the Brandenburger Literaturpreis in 1995, the Leipziger Buchpreis
zur Europäischen Verständigung in 1997, the Herder-Preis and the WELT-Literaturpreis
in 2000, the Ehrenpreis der Robert-Bosch-Stiftung in 2001 and Hans Sahl-Preis in 2002.
Works in English
Fateless / translated by Christopher C. Wilson and Katharina M. Wilson. – Evanston, Ill. :
Northwestern University Press, 1992. – Uniform title: Sorstalanság
Kaddish for a Child Not Born / translated by Christopher C. Wilson and Katharina M.
Wilson. – Evanston, Ill. : Hydra Books, 1997. – Uniform title: Kaddis a meg nem született
gyermekért
Liquidation / translated from the original Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson. – New York :
Knopf, cop. 2004. – Uniform Title: Felszámolás*
Fatelessness : a Novel / translated from the Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson. - New York :
22
Vintage International, 2004*

"for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us
to see the presence of suppressed histories"
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

United Kingdom
b. 1932
(in Trinidad)
The British writer, born in Trinidad, V(idiadhar) S(urajprasad) Naipaul was born in
1932 in Chaguanas, close to the Port of Spain on Trinidad, in a family descended from
immigrants from the north of India. His grandfather worked in a sugar cane plantation
23
and his father was a journalist and writer. At the age of 18 Naipaul travelled to England
where, after studying at University College at Oxford, he was awarded the degree of
Bachelor of Arts in 1953. From then on he continued to live in England (since the 70s in
Wiltshire, close to Stonehenge) but he has also spent a great deal of time travelling in
Asia, Africa and America. Apart from a few years in the middle of the 1950s, when he
was employed by the BBC as a free-lance journalist, he has devoted himself entirely to
his writing.
Naipaul's works consist mainly of novels and short stories, but also include some that are
documentary. He is to a very high degree a cosmopolitan writer, a fact that he himself
considers to stem from his lack of roots: he is unhappy about the cultural and spiritual
poverty of Trinidad, he feels alienated from India, and in England he is incapable of
relating to and identifying with the traditional values of what was once a colonial power.
The events in his earliest books take place in the West Indies. A few years after the
publication of his first work, The Mystic Masseur (1957), came what is considered by
many to be one of his most outstanding novels, A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), in which
the protagonist is modelled on the author's father.
After the enormous success of A House for Mr. Biswas, Naipaul extended the
geographical and social perspective of his writing to describe with increasing pessimism
the deleterious impact of colonialism and emerging nationalism on the third world, in for
instance Guerrillas (1975) and A Bend in the River (1979), the latter a portrayal of Africa
that has been compared to Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
In his travel books and his documentary works he presents his impressions of the country
of his ancestors, India, as in India : a Million Mutinies Now (1990), and also critical
assessments of Muslim fundamentalism in non-Arab countries such as Indonesia, Iran,
Malaysia and Pakistan in Among the Believers (1981) and Beyond Belief (1998).
The novels The Enigma of Arrival (1987) and A Way in the World (1994) are to a great
extent autobiographical. In The Enigma of Arrival he describes how a landed estate in
southern England and its proprietor, with a colonial background and afflicted by a
degenerative disease, gradually decline before finally perishing. A Way in the World,
which is a cross between fiction, memoirs and history, consists of nine independent but
thematically linked narratives in which Caribbean and Indian traditions are blended with
the culture encountered by the author when he moved to England at the age of 18.
V.S. Naipaul has been awarded a number of literary prizes, among them the Booker Prize
in 1971 and the T.S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing in 1986. He is an honorary doctor
of St. Andrew's College and Columbia University and of the Universities of Cambridge,
London and Oxford. In 1990 he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth.
A selection of works by V.S. Naipaul

The Mystic Masseur. – London: Deutsch, 1957.
Miguel Street. – London: Deutsch, 1959.
24
A House for Mr. Biswas. – London: Deutsch, 1961.

The Middle Passage : Impressions of Five Societies – British, French and Dutch in the
West Indies and South America. – London: Deutsch, 1962.
Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion. – London: Deutsch, 1963.
A Flag on the Island. – London: Deutsch, 1967.
The Loss of El Dorado : a History. – London: Deutsch, 1969.
In a Free State. – London: Deutsch, 1971.
The Overcrowded Barracoon and Other Articles. – London: Deutsch, 1972.
Guerrillas. – London: Deutsch, 1975.
India : a Wounded Civilization. – London: Deutsch, 1977.
A Bend in the River. – London: Deutsch, 1979.
A Congo Diary. – Los Angeles, CA: Sylvester & Orphanos, 1980.
Among the Believers : an Islamic Journey. – London: Deutsch, 1981.
The Enigma of Arrival. – London: Viking, 1987.
India : a Million Mutinies Now. – London: Heinemann, 1990.
A Way in the World. – London: Heinemann, 1994.
Beyond Belief : Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples. – London: Little,
Brown, 1998.
Reading and Writing : a Personal Account. – New York: New York Review of Books,
2000.
Half a Life. – London: Picador, 2001.
The Writer and the World : Essays. Introduced and edited by Pankaj Mishra. – London :
Picador, 2002 ; New York : Knopf, 2002*
Literary Occasions : Essays. Introduced and edited by Pankaj Mishra. – London : Picador,
2003 ; New York : Knopf, 2003*
Magic Seeds : [novel]. – London : Picador, 2003 ; New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2004*
Vintage Naipaul. – New York : Vintage Books, 2004*
25

"for an œuvre of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity, which has
opened new paths for the Chinese novel and drama"
Gao Xingjian
France
b. 1940
(in Ganzhou, China)
Gao Xingjian, born January 4, 1940 in Ganzhou (Jiangxi province) in eastern China, is
today a French citizen. Writer of prose, translator, dramatist, director, critic and artist.
Gao Xingjian grew up during the aftermath of the Japanese invasion, his father was a
bank official and his mother an amateur actress who stimulated the young Gao’s interest
in the theatre and writing. He received his basic education in the schools of the People’s
Republic and took a degree in French in 1962 at the Department of Foreign Languages in
Beijing. During the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) he was sent to a re-education camp
and felt it necessary to burn a suitcase full of manuscripts. Not until 1979 could he
publish his work and travel abroad, to France and Italy. During the period 1980–87 he
published short stories, essays and dramas in literary magazines in China and also four
26
books: Premier essai sur les techniques du roman moderne / A Preliminary Discussion of
the Art of Modern Fiction (1981) which gave rise to a violent polemic on “modernism”,
the narrative A Pigeon Called Red Beak (1985), Collected Plays (1985) and In Search of
a Modern Form of Dramatic Representation (1987). Several of his experimental and
pioneering plays - inspired in part by Brecht, Artaud and Beckett - were produced at the
Theatre of Popular Art in Beijing: his theatrical debut with Signal d’alarme / Signal
Alarm (1982) was a tempestuous success, and the absurd drama which established his
reputation Arrêt de bus / Bus Stop (1983) was condemned during the campaign against
“intellectual pollution” (described by one eminent member of the party as the most
pernicious piece of writing since the foundation of the People’s Republic); L’Homme
sauvage / Wild Man (1985) also gave rise to heated domestic polemic and international
attention.
In 1986 L’autre rive / The Other Shore was banned and since then none of his plays have
been performed in China. In order to avoid harassment he undertook a ten-month
walking-tour of the forest and mountain regions of Sichuan Province, tracing the course
of the Yangzi river from its source to the coast. In 1987 he left China and settled down a
year later in Paris as a political refugee. After the massacre on the Square of Heavenly
Peace in 1989 he left the Chinese Communist Party. After publication of La fuite /
Fugitives, which takes place against the background of this massacre, he was declared
persona non grata by the regime and his works were banned. In the summer of 1982,
Gao Xingjian had already started working on his prodigious novel La Montagne de
l’Âme / Soul Mountain in which - by means of an odyssey in time and space through the
Chinese countryside - he enacts an individual’s search for roots, inner peace and liberty.
This is supplemented by the more autobiographical Le Livre d’un homme seul / One
Man’s Bible. A number of his works have been translated into various languages, and
today several of his plays are being produced in various parts of the world. In Sweden he
has been translated and introduced by Göran Malmqvist, and two of his plays (Summer
Rain in Peking, Fugitives) have been performed at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in
Stockholm.
Gao Xingjian paints in ink and has had some thirty international exhibitions and provides
the cover illustrations for his own books. Awards: Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des
Lettres 1992; Prix Communauté française de Belgique 1994 (for Le somnambule), Prix
du Nouvel An chinois 1997 (for Soul Mountain).
A selection of works by Gao Xingjian in English

Wild Man: a Contemporary Chinese Spoken Drama / transl. and annotated by Bruno
Roubicek // Asian Theatre Journal. Vol. 7, Nr 2. Fall 1990.
Fugitives / transl. by Gregory B. Lee // Lee, Gregory B., Chinese Writing and Exile. –
Center of East Asian Studies at the Universtity of Chicago, 1993.
The Other Shore: Plays by Gao Xingjian / transl. by Gilbert C.F. Fong. – Hong Kong: The
Chinese University Press, 1999.
Soul Mountain / transl. by Mabel Lee. – HarperCollins, 1999.
One Man’s Bible. – [In transl. by Mabel Lee]
27
Contemporary Technique and National Character in Fiction / transl. by Ng Mau-sang. –

[Extract from A Preliminary Discussion of the Art of Modern Fiction, 1981]
The Voice of the Individual // Stockholm Journal of East Asian Studies 6, 1995.
Without Isms / transl. by W. Lau, D. Sauviat & M. Williams // Journal of the Oriental
Society of Australia. Vols 27 & 28, 1995–96.
One Man's Bible : a Novel / translated from the Chinese by Mabel Lee. – London :
Flamingo, 2002 ; New York : HarperCollins, 2002. - Uniform Title: Yi ge ren de sheng
jing*
Return to Painting / translated from the French by Nadia Benabid. – New York :
Perennial, cop. 2002. – Uniform Title: Pour une autre esthétique*
Ink Paintings by Gao Xingjian : Nobel Prize Winner. – Dumont, NJ : Homa & Sekey
Books, 2002*
Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather : Stories / translated from the Chinese by
Mabel Lee. – London : Flamingo, 2002 ; New York : HarperCollins, cop. 2004. – Uniform
Title: Gei wo lao ye mai yu gan*

"whose frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history"
Photo: H. Grunert
Günter Grass
Federal Republic of Germany
b. 1927
(in Danzig)
28
Günter Grass born 1927 in Danzig-Langfuhr of Polish-German parents. After military

service and captivity by American forces 1944-46, he worked as a farm labourer and
miner and studied art in Düsseldorf and Berlin. 1956-59 he made his living as a sculptor,
graphic artist and writer in Paris, and subsequently Berlin. In 1955 Grass became a
member of the socially critical Gruppe 47 (later described with great warmth in The
Meeting at Telgte), his first poetry was published in 1956 and his first play produced in
1957. His major international breakthrough came in 1959 with his allegorical and wide-
ranging picaresque novel The Tin Drum (filmed by Schlöndorff), a satirical panorama of
German reality during the first half of this century, which, with Cat and Mouse and Dog
Years, was to form what is called the Danzig Trilogy. In the 1960s Grass became active in
politics, participating in election campaigns on behalf of the Social Democrat party and
Willy Brandt. He dealt with the responsibility of intellectuals in Local Anaesthetic, From
the Diary of a Snail and in his "German tragedy" The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising,
and published political speeches and essays in which he advocated a Germany free from
fanaticism and totalitarian ideologies. His childhood home, Danzig, and his broad and
suggestive fabulations were to reappear in two successful novels criticising civilisation,
The Flounder and The Rat, which reflect Grass's commitment to the peace movement and
the environmental movement. Vehement debate and criticism were aroused by his
mammoth novel Ein weites Feld which is set in the DDR in the years of the collapse of
communism and the fall of the Berlin wall. In My Century he presents the history of the
past century from a personal point of view, year by year. As a graphic artist, Grass has
often been responsible for the covers and illustrations for his own works. - President of
the Akademie der Künste in Berlin 1983-86, active within the German Authors'
Publishing Company and PEN. He has been awarded a large number of prizes, among
them Preis der Gruppe 47 1958, "Le meilleur livre étranger" 1962, the Büchner Prize
1965, the Fontane Prize 1968, Premio Internazionale Mondello 1977, the Alexander-
Majakowski Medal, Gdansk 1979, the Antonio-Feltrinelli Prize 1982, Großer
Literaturpreis der Bayerischen Akademie 1994. Honorary doctorates from Kenyon
College and the Universities of Harvard, Poznan and Gdansk.
A selection of works by Günter Grass in English

The Tin Drum. Transl. by Ralph Manheim. – London: Secker & Warburg, 1962.
Cat and Mouse. Transl. by Ralph Manheim. – San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1963.
Dog Years. Transl. by Ralph Manheim. – New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965.
Four Plays. Introd. by Martin Esslin. – New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967.
Speak out! Speeches, Open Letters, Commentaries. Transl. by Ralph Manheim. – London:
Secker & Warburg, 1969.
Local Anaesthetic. Transl. by Ralph Manheim. – New York: Harcourt, Brace & World,
1970.
From the Diary of a Snail. Transl. by Ralph Manheim. – New York: Harcourt Brace
29
Jovanovich, 1973.
In the Egg and Other Poems. Transl. by Michael Hamburger and Christopher Middleton.
– New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977.
The Meeting at Telgte. Transl. by Ralph Manheim. – New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1981.
The Flounder. Transl. by Ralph Manheim. – New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.
Headbirths, or, the Germans are Dying Out. Transl. by Ralph Manheim. – New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982.
The Rat. Transl. by Ralph Manheim. – San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987.
Show Your Tongue. Transl. by John E. Woods. – San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1987.
Two States One Nation? Transl. by Rishna Winston with A.S. Wensinger. – San Diego:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990; London: Secker & Warburg.
The Call of the Toad. Transl. by Ralph Manheim. – New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1992.
The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising. Transl. by Ralph Manheim. – New York: Harcourt
Brace, 1996.
My Century. Transl. by Michael Henry Heim. – New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999.
Too Far Afield. Translated from the German by Krishna Winston. – London : Faber,
2000 ; New York : Harcourt, cop. 2000. – Uniform Title: Ein Weites Feld.*
Crabwalk. Translated from the German by Krishna Winston. – Orlando : Harcourt, cop.
2002 ; London : Faber, 2003. – Uniform Title: Im Krebsgang.*
The Günter Grass Reader. Edited by Helmut Frielinghaus. – Orlando : Harcourt, cop.
2004.*
30

"who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables
us once again to apprehend an elusory reality"
José Saramago
Portugal
b. 1922
José Saramago was born in 1922 to a family of farmers in the little village of Azinhaga
(Ribatejo) north of Lisbon. For financial reasons he abandoned his high-school studies
and trained as a mechanic. After trying different jobs in the civil service, he worked for a
publishing company for twelve years and then for newspapers, at one time as assistant
editor of Diário de Notícias, a position he was forced to leave after the political events in
November 1975. In 1969 he joined the then illegal Communist Party, in which however
he has always adopted a critical standpoint. Between 1975 and 1980 Saramago supported
himself as a translator but since his literary successes in the 1980s he has devoted himself
to his own writing. His international breakthrough came in 1982 with the blasphemous
and humorous love story "Baltasar and Blimunda", a novel set in 18th century Portugal.
Since 1992 he has been living on Lanzarote, the northeasternmost of the Canaries.
Saramago's oeuvre totals 30 works, and comprises not only prose but also poetry, essays
and drama. His awards include Prémio Cidade de Lisboa 1980, Prémio PEN Club
Português 1983 and 1984, Prémio da Crítica da Associação Portuguesa 1986, Grande
Prémio de Romance e Novela 1991, Prémio Vida Literária 1993, Prémio Camões 1995.
In English
Baltasar and Blimunda. Translated from the Portuguese by Giovanni Pontiero. – New
York : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, cop. 1987 ; London : Cape, 1988. – Uniform Title:
Memorial do convento
The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. Translated by Giovanni Pontiero. – San Diego :
31
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991 ; London : Harvill, 1992. – Uniform Title: O ano da
morte de Ricardo Reis
The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. Translated from the Portuguese by Giovanni
Pontiero. – London : Harvill, 1993 ; New York : Harcourt Brace & Co., 1994. – Uniform
Title: O Evangelho segundo Jesus Cristo
Manual of Painting and Calligraphy: a Novel. Translated from the Portuguese by
Giovanni Pontiero. – Manchester : Carcanet, 1994. – Uniform Title: Manual de pintura e
caligrafia
The Stone Raft. Translated from the Portuguese by Giovanni Pontiero. – London : Harvill,
1994 ; New York : Harcourt Brace, cop. 1995. – Uniform Title: Jangada de pedra
The History of the Siege of Lisbon. Translated from the Portuguese by Giovanni Pontiero.
– New York : Harcourt Brace, 1996 ; London : Harvill, 1996. – Uniform Title: História do
cerco de Lisboa
Blindness. Translated from the Portuguese by Giovanni Pontiero. – London : Harvill,
1997. Thorndike, Me. : Thorndike Press, 1999. – Uniform Title : Ensaio sobre a cegueira
Baltasar & Blimunda. Translated from the Portuguese by Giovanni Pontiero. – London :
Harvill, 1998. – Uniform Title: Memorial do convento. Note : The English text as
originally publ. embodied a number of editorial amendments which the author requested
be overruled; the labour of reinstating the text in accordance with the author's wishes was
undertaken by Giovanni Pontiero
All the Names. Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa. – New York :
Harcourt, 1999 ; London : Harvill, 1999. – Uniform Title: Todos os nomes
The Tale of the Unknown Island. Illustrated by Peter Sís ; translated from the Portuguese
by Margaret Jull Costa. – London : Harvill, 1999 ; New York : Harcourt Brace, cop.
1999. – Uniform Title: Conto da ilha desconhecida*
Journey to Portugal : In Pursuit of Portugal's History and Culture. Translated from the
Portuguese and with notes by Amanda Hopkinson and Nick Caistor. – London : Harvill,
2000 ; New York : Harcourt, 2000. – Uniform Title: Viagem a Portugal*
The Cave. Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa. – London : Harvill,
2002 ; New York : Harcourt, cop. 2002. – Uniform Title: A Caverna*
The Double. Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa. – London : Harvill,
2004 ; Orlando : Harcourt, cop. 2004. – Uniform Title: O Homem duplicado*
Seeing. Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa. - London : Harvill, 2006*

32
"who emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the
dignity of the downtrodden"
Dario Fo
Italy
b. 1926
Dario Fo, one of the leading figures in modern farce and political drama, was born in
1926 in the village of Sangiano (Varese) in Lombardy, where while still young he came
into contact with popular theatrical and narrative traditions (his grandfather was a well-
known fabulatore). After studying art and architecture in Milan, Fo took part in radio
programmes with a series of monologues Poer Nano ("Poor Dwarf"), made his debut as
an actor in 1952 (Teatro Odeon, Milan), and in the same year began to write satirical
cabarets and to act at the Piccolo Theatre. In 1954 he married the actress Franca Rame. In
1959 the couple founded their own company, in which Franca Rame was the leading lady
and Fo the writer, producer, mime and actor. He achieved international fame in 1960 with
Gli arcangeli non giocano a flipper ("Archangels Don't Play Pinball"). In 1968 with left-
wing support (ARCI/PCI) he founded the theatre co-operative "Nuova Scena", soon
wound up because of ideological controversy. In 1970 Fo parted company with the
Communist Party and the couple founded the theatre collective "La Comune". After
having occupied Palazzina Liberty in Milan, the company was given a permanent theatre,
which opened in 1974 with the success We Can't Pay We Won't Pay!. Fo's opposition to
conformism, the courage of his convictions, and his political and social commitment,
have involved him in numerous court cases and controversies with the Italian state, the
police, the censors, television (the "scandal programme" Canzonissima) and the Vatican
(according to the Pope, Mistero Buffo had "desecrated Italian religious feelings"). In 1980
Fo was refused an entry visa for a performance in the USA because of his membership in
"Soccorso Rosso", an organisation supporting prison inmates. Together with Rame, Fo
has written a number of monologues (for instance Tutta casa, letto e chiesa, "All Home,
Bed and Church") inspired by the struggle of Italy's women for the right to divorce and
33
legal abortion. His collected plays include 70 or so works. In 1981 Fo was awarded the
Sonning Prize.
In English also Dario Fo. Plays: One. & Plays: Two, with introd. by Stuart Hood. –
Methuen, 1994
The Tale of a Tiger. – Theatretexts, 1984
A Woman Alone and Other Plays. – Methuen, 1991
Acting Diana. – Oberon Books, 1994
The Pope and the Witch. Translated by Joan Holden. – London : Methuen Drama, 1992. –
Uniform Title: Papa e la strega*
Plays. With an introduction by series editor, Stuart Hood. – London : Methuen Drama,
1997. 2 vol.*
Contents: 1. Mistero Buffo. Translated by Ed Emery ; Accidental Death of an Anarchist.
Translated by Ed Emery ; Trumpets and Raspberries. Translated by R.C. McAvoy and
A.M. Giugni ; The Virtuous Burglar. Translated by Joe Farrell ; One was Nude and One
Wore Tails. Translated by Ed Emery
Contents: 2. Can't pay? Won't pay?. Translated by Lino Pertile ; Elizabeth : almost by
chance a woman. Translated by Gillian Hanna ; The open couple. Written with Franca
Rame ; translated by Stuart Hood ; An Ordinary Day. Written with Franca Rame ;
translated by Joe Farrell.
Notes: Vol. 2 has introduction also by Franca Rame. Originally published: London :
Methuen Drama, 1992.
Johan Padan and the Discovery of the Americas. Translated from the Italian by Ron
Jenkins with the assistance of Stefania Taviano. – New York : Grove Press, cop. 2001. –
Uniform Title: Johan Padan a la descoverta de le Americhe.*
The Peasants Bible ; and, The story of the Tiger. Translated from the Italian by Ron
Jenkins. – New York : Grove Press, 2004. – Uniform Title: Bibbia dei villani.*
My First Seven Years (Plus a Few More). Joe Farrell (trans). – London : Methuen, 2005. –
Uniform Title: Il paese dei mezaràt : i miei primi sette anni (e qualcuno in più)*

"for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come
to light in fragments of human reality"
34
Wislawa Szymborska
Poland
b. 1923
Biobibliographical Note
Wislawa Szymborska was born 2 July 1923 in the small western Polish town of Bnin
(now a part of Kórnik), near Poznan. Since 1931 she has been living in Cracow, where
she studied Polish literature and sociology at the Jagellonian University between 1945
and 1948. In March 1945 she made her début with the poem "Szukam slowa" ("I seek the
word") in a weekly supplement of the daily paper Dziennik Polski, and during the period
immediately after the war she continued to publish poems in various newspapers and
periodicals. From 1953 to 1981 she was on the editorial staff of the weekly magazine
Zycie Literackie (Literary Life), where in a column entitled "Non-compulsory reading"
she reviewed books on a wide variety of subjects: from tourism, cooking, gardening and
witchcraft to the history of art, T.S. Eliot's cat poetry and Edward Lear's nonsense verse.
Szymborska has also translated a fair amount of lyric poetry, especially French Baroque
poetry and Agrippa d'Aubigné. During the 1980s she collaborated under the pseudonym
Stanczykówna in the Polish "samizdat" publication Arka and in the exile magazine
Kultura, which was published in Paris. Her poetry can be found in a large number of
European languages, and also in Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese and Chinese.
Prizes and distinctions

The City of Cracow Prize for Literature 1954.
The Polish Ministry of Culture Prize 1963.
The Goethe Prize 1991.
The Herder Prize 1995.
Honorary Doctor of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan 1995.
The Polish PEN Club prize 1996.
In English
35
Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts: Seventy Poems. Transl. and introd. by Magnus J. Krynski
and Robert A. Maguire. – Princeton, N.J : Princeton University Press, 1981
People on a Bridge : Poems. Introduced and translated by Adam Czerniawski. –
London : Forest Books, 1990
View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems. Translated from the Polish by Stanislaw
Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh. – New York : Harcourt, Brace, 1995
Nothing Twice : Selected Poems. Selected and translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and
Clare Cavanagh. – Kraków : Wyd. Literackie, 1997*
Poems, New and Collected, 1957-1997. Translated from the Polish by Stanislaw
Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh. – New York : Harcourt, Brace, 1998*
Nic darowane = Nothing's a Gift. Tl. Stanislaw Baranczak et al. ; wybór tekstów Mosze
Chaim Porajer. – Warszawa : "Shalom", 1999*
Miracle Fair : Selected Poems of Wislawa Szymborska. Translated by Joanna Trzeciak. –
New York : Norton, 2001*
Nonrequired Reading : Prose Pieces. Translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh. –
New York : Harcourt, 2002*
Chwila = Moment. Przekl. Clare Cavanagh, Stanislaw Baranczak. – Kraków : "Znak",
2003. – Polish original with English translation*
Selections from her poetry appear in the following collections

Polish Writing Today. Ed. by C. Wieniewska. 1967
The Burning Forest. Modern Polish Poetry. Ed. and transl. by Adam Czerniawski. –
Bloodaxe Books 1988
Ariadne's Thread: Polish Women Poets. Ed. and transl. by Susan Bassnett and Piotr
Kuhiwczak. 1988

"for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the
living past"
36
Seamus Heaney
Ireland
b. 1939
Seamus Heaney was born in April 1939, the eldest member of a family which would
eventually contain nine children. His father owned and worked a small farm of some fifty
acres in County Derry in Northern Ireland, but the father's real commitment was to cattle-
dealing. There was something very congenial to Patrick Heaney about the cattle-dealer's
way of life to which he was introduced by the uncles who had cared for him after the
early death of his own parents. The poet's mother came from a family called McCann
whose connections were more with the modern world than with the traditional rural
economy; her uncles and relations were employed in the local linen mill and an aunt had
worked "in service" to the mill owners' family. The poet has commented on the fact that
his parentage thus contains both the Ireland of the cattle-herding Gaelic past and the
Ulster of the Industrial Revolution; indeed, he considers this to have been a significant
tension in his background, something which corresponds to another inner tension also
inherited from his parents, namely that between speech and silence. His father was
notably sparing of talk and his mother notably ready to speak out, a circumstance which
Seamus Heaney believes to have been fundamental to the "quarrel with himself" out of
which his poetry arises.
Heaney grew up as a country boy and attended the local primary school. As a very young
child, he watched American soldiers on manoeuvres in the local fields, in preparation for
the Normandy invasion of 1944. They were stationed at an aerodrome which had been
built a mile or so from his home and once again Heaney has taken this image of himself
as a consciousness poised between "history and ignorance" as representative of the nature
of his poetic life and development. Even though his family left the farm where he was
reared (it was called Mossbawn) in 1953, and even though his life since then has been a
series of moves farther and farther away from his birthplace, the departures have been
more geographical than psychological: rural County Derry is the "country of the mind"
where much of Heaney's poetry is still grounded.
When he was twelve years of age, Seamus Heaney won a scholarship to St. Columb's
37
College, a Catholic boarding school situated in the city of Derry, forty miles away from
the home farm, and this first departure from Mossbawn was the decisive one. It would be
followed in years to come by a transfer to Belfast where he lived between 1957 and 1972,
and by another move from Belfast to the Irish Republic where Heaney has made his
home, and then, since 1982, by regular, annual periods of teaching in America. All of
these subsequent shifts and developments were dependent, however, upon that original
journey from Mossbawn which the poet has described as a removal from "the earth of
farm labour to the heaven of education." It is not surprising, then, that this move has
turned out to be a recurrent theme in his work, from "Digging", the first poem in his first
book, through the much more orchestrated treatment of it in "Alphabets"(The Haw
Lantern, 1987), to its most recent appearance in "A Sofa in the Forties" which was
published this year in The Spirit Level.
At St. Columb's College, Heaney was taught Latin and Irish, and these languages,
together with the Anglo-Saxon which he would study while a student of Queen's
University, Belfast, were determining factors in many of the developments and
retrenchments which have marked his progress as a poet. The first verses he wrote when
he was a young teacher in Belfast in the early 1960s and many of the best known poems
in North, his important volume published in 1975, are linguistically tuned to the Anglo-
Saxon note in English. His poetic line was much more resolutely stressed and packed
during this period than it would be in the eighties and nineties when the "Mediterranean"
elements in the literary and linguistic heritage of English became more pronounced.
Station Island (1984) reveals Dante, for example, as a crucial influence, and echoes of
Virgil - as well as a translation from Book VI of The Aeneid - are to be found in Seeing
Things (1991). Heaney's early study of Irish bore fruit in the translation of the Middle
Irish story of Suibhne Gealt in Sweeney Astray (1982) and in several other translations
and echoes and allusions: the Gaelic heritage has always has been part of his larger
keyboard of reference and remains culturally and politically central to the poet and his
work.
Heaney's poems first came to public attention in the mid-1960s when he was active as
one of a group of poets who were subsequently recognized as constituting something of a
"Northern School" within Irish writing. Although Heaney is stylistically and
temperamentally different from such writers as Michael Longley and Derek Mahon (his
contemporaries), and Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian and Ciaran Carson (members of
a younger Northern Irish generation), he does share with all of them the fate of having be
en born into a society deeply divided along religious and political lines, one which was
doomed moreover to suffer a quarter-century of violence, polarization and inner distrust.
This had the effect not only of darkening the mood of Heaney's work in the 1970s, but
also of giving him a deep preoccupation with the question of poetry's responsibilities and
prerogatives in the world, since poetry is poised between a need for creative freedom
within itself and a pressure to express the sense of social obligation felt by the poet as
citizen. The essays in Heaney's three main prose collections, but especially those in The
Government of the Tongue (1988) and The Redress of Poetry (1995), bear witness to the
seriousness which this question assumed for him as he was coming into his own as a
writer.
38
These concerns also lie behind Heaney's involvement for a decade and a half with Field
Day, a theatre company founded in 1980 by the playwright Brian Friel and the actor
Stephen Real. Here, he was also associated with the poets Seamus Deane and Tom Paul
in, and the singer David Hammond in a project which sought to bring the artistic and
intellectual focus of its members into productive relation with the crisis that was ongoing
in Irish political life. Through a series of plays and pamphlets (culminating in Heaney's
case in his version of Sophocles' Philoctetes which the company produced and toured in
1990 under the title, The Cure at Troy), Field Day contributed greatly to the vigour of the
cultural debate which flourished throughout the 1980s and 1990s in Ireland.
Heaney's beginnings as a poet coincided with his meeting the woman whom he was to
marry and who was to be the mother of his three children. Marie Devlin, like her
husband, came from a large family, several of whom are themselves writers and artists,
including the poet's wife who has recently published an important collection of retellings
of the classic Irish myths and legends (Over Nine Waves, 1994). Marie Heaney has been
central to the poet's life, both professionally and imaginatively, appearing directly and
indirectly in individual poems from all periods of his oeuvre right down to the most
recent, and making it possible for him to travel annually to Harvard by staying on in
Dublin as custodian of the growing family and the family home.
The Heaneys had spent a very liberating year abroad in 1970/71 when Seamus was a
visiting lecturer at the Berkeley campus of the University of California. It was the sense
of self-challenge and new scope which he experienced in the American context that
encouraged him to resign his lectureship at Queen's University (1966-72) not long after
he returned to Ireland, and to move to a cottage in County Wicklow in order to work full
time as a poet and free-lance writer. A few years later, the family moved to Dublin and
Seamus worked as a lecturer in Carysfort College, a teacher training college, where he
functioned as Head of the English Department until 1982, when his present arrangement
with Harvard University came into existence. This allows the poet to spend eight months
at home without teaching in exchange for one semester's work at Harvard. In 1984,
Heaney was named Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, one of the university's
most prestigious offices. In 1989, he was elected for a five-year period to be Professor of
Poetry at Oxford University, a post which requires the incumbent to deliver three public
lectures every year but which does not require him to reside in Oxford.
In the course of his career, Seamus Heaney has always contributed to the promotion of
artistic and educational causes, both in Ireland and abroad. While a young lecturer at
Queen's University, he was active in the publication of pamphlets of poetry by the rising
generation and took over the running of an influential poetry workshop which had been
established there by the English poet, Philip Hobsbaum, when Hobsbaum left Belfast in
1966. He also served for five years on The Arts Council in the Republic of Ireland (1973-
1978) and over the years has acted as judge and lecturer for countless poetry competitions
and literary conferences, establishing a special relationship with the annual W.B. Yeats
International Summer School in Sligo. In recent years, he has been the recipient of
several honorary degrees; he is a member of Aosdana, the Irish academy of artists and
39
writers, and a Foreign Member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1996,
subsequent to his winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995, he was made a
Commandeur de L'Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture.
Bibliography
Poetry (a selection)
Eleven Poems. Belfast : Festival Publications, Queen's University, 1965
Death of a Naturalist. London : Faber, 1966
A Lough Neagh Sequence. Didsbury, Manchester : Phoenix Pamphlets Poets Press, 1969
Boy Driving His Father to Confession. Farnham, Surrey : Sceptre Press, 1970 (150
numbered copies)
Night Drive. Crediton, Devon : Richard Gilbertson, 1970
Servant Boy. Detroit : Red Hanrahan Press, 1971
Wintering Out. London : Faber, 1972
Stations. Belfast : Ulsterman Publications, 1975
North. London : Faber, 1975
Bog Poems : London : Rainbow Press, 1975
After Summer. Old Deerfield, Mass.: Deerfield Press / Dublin: Gallery Press, 1978
Field Work. London : Faber, 1979
Gravities : a Collection of Poems and Drawings. Newcastle upon Tyne : Charlotte Press,
1979
Hedge School : Sonnets from Glanmore. Salem, Ore.: C. Seluzichi, 1979
Selected Poems 1965-1975. London : Faber, 1980
An Open Letter. Derry : Field Day, 1983
Hailstones. Dublin : Gallery Press, 1984
Station Island. London : Faber, 1984
The Haw Lantern. Faber, 1987
New Selected Poems 1966-1987. London : Faber, 1990
The Tree Clock. Belfast : Linen Hall Library, 1990
Seeing Things. London : Faber, 1991
Keeping Going. Concord, N.H. : Bow and Arrow Press, 1993
The Spirit Level. Faber, 1996
Opened Ground : poems, 1966-1996. Faber, 1998
Electric Light. London : Faber, 2001
District and Circle. London : Faber, 2006
Prose, Essays (a selection)

40
The Fire i' the Flint : Reflections on the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. London :
Oxford University Press, 1975
Preoccupations : Selected Prose 1968-1978. London : Faber 1980
The Government of the Tongue. London : Faber 1988
The Place of Writing. Atlanta : Scholars Press, 1989
The Redress of Poetry : Oxford lectures. London : Faber 1995
Crediting Poetry : the Nobel lecture. London : Faber, 1995
Finders Keepers : Selected Prose, 1971-2001. London : Faber, 2002
Translations
Sweeney Astray : a Version From the Irish by Seamus Heaney. London : Faber, 1984
The Cure at Troy : a version of Sophocles' Philoctetes. Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1991
The Midnight Verdict. Old Castle : Gallery Books, 1993
Beowulf : a New Translation. London : Faber, 1999
The Burial at Thebes : a Version of Sophocles' Antigone. New York : Farrar, Straus, 2004

"who with poetic force creates an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form
a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today"
41
Kenzaburo Oe
Japan
b. 1935
Kenzaburo Oe was born in 1935, in a village hemmed in by the forests of Shikoku, one
of the four main islands of Japan. His family had lived in the village tradition for several
hundred years, and no one in the Oe clan had ever left the village in the valley. Even after
Japan embarked on modernization soon after the Meiji Restoration, and it became
customary for young people in the provinces to leave their native place for Tokyo or the
other large cities, the Oes remained in Ose-mura. Maps no longer show the small hamlet
by name because it was annexed by a neighbouring town. The women of the Oe clan had
long assumed the role of storytellers and had related the historical events of the region,
including the two uprisings that occurred there before and after the Meiji Restoration.
They also told of events closer in nature to legend than to history. These stories, of a
unique cosmology and of the human condition therein, which Oe heard told since his
infancy, left him with an indelible mark.
The Second World War broke out when Oe was six. Militaristic education extended to
every nook and cranny of the country, the Emperor as both monarch and deity reigning
over its politics and its culture. Young Oe, therefore, experienced the nation's myth and
history as well as those of the village tradition, and these dual experiences were often in
conflict. Oe's grandmother was a critical storyteller who defended the culture of the
village, narrating to him humourously, but ever defiantly, anti-national stories. After his
father's death during the war, his mother took over his father's role as educator. The books
she bought him - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Strange Adventures of
Nils Holgersson - have left him with an impression he says 'he will carry to the grave'.
Japan's defeat in the war in 1945 brought enormous change, even to the remote forest
village. In schools, children were taught democratic principles, replacing those of the
absolutist Emperor system, and this education was all the more thorough, for the nation
was then under the administration of American and other forces. Young Oe took
democracy straight to his heart. So strong was his desire for democracy that he decided to
leave for Tokyo; leave the village of his forefathers, the life they had lived and preserved,
out of sheer belief that the city offered him an opportunity to knock on the door of
democracy, the door that would lead him to a future of freedom on paths that stretched
out to the world. Had it not been for the drastic change the nation underwent at this time,
Oe, whose love of trees is one of his innate qualities, would have remained in his village
as his forefathers had done, and tended to the forest as one of its guardians.
At the age of eighteen, Oe made his first long train trip to Tokyo, and in the following
year enrolled in the Department of French Literature at Tokyo University where he
received instruction under the tutelage of Professor Kazuo Watanabe, a specialist on
Francois Rabelais. Rabelais' image system of grotesque realism, to use Mikhail Bakhtin's
terminology, provided him with a methodology to positively and thoroughly reassess the
myths and history of his native village in the valley.
42
Watanabe's thoughts on humanism, which he arrived at from his study of the French
Renaissance, helped shape Oe's fundamental view of society and the human condition.
An avid reader of contemporary French and American literature, Oe viewed the social
condition of the metropolis in light of the works he read. Yet, he also endeavored to
reorganize, under the light of Rabelais and humanism, his thoughts on what the women of
the village had handed down to him, those stories that constituted his background. In this
sense, he was again living another duality.
Oe started writing in 1957, while still a French literature student at the university. His
works from 1957 through 1958 - from the short story, The Catch, which won him the
Akutagawa Award, to his first novel, Bud-Nipping, Lamb Shooting* (1958) - depict the
tragedy of war tearing asunder the idyllic life of a rural youth. In Lavish are the Dead
(1957), a short story, and in The Youth Who Came Late* (1961), a novel, Oe portrayed
student life in Tokyo, a city where the dark shadows of the U.S. occupation still
remained. Apparent in these works are strong influences of Jean-Paul Sartre and other
modern French writers.
Crisis struck Oe's life and literature with the birth of his first son, Hikari. Hikari was born
with a cranial deformity resulting in his becoming a mentally- handicapped person.
Traumatic as the experience was for Oe, the crisis granted him a new lease on both his
life and his literature. Overcoming the agony and determined to coexist with the child, Oe
wrote A Personal Matter (1964), his penning of his pain in accepting the brain-damaged
child into his life, and of how he arrived at his resolve to live with him. Through the
catalytic medium of humanism, he conjoined his own fate of having to accept a
handicapped child into the family with that of the stance one ought to take in
contemporary society, and wrote Hiroshima Notes (1965), a long essay which describes
the realities and thoughts of the A-bomb victims.
Following this, Oe deepened his interest in Okinawa, the southernmost group of islands
in Japan. Before the Meiji Restoration, Okinawa was an independent country with its
own culture. During World War II, the islands became the site of the only battle Japan
fought on its own soil. After the war, the people of Okinawa were left to suffer a long
U.S. military occupation. Oe's interest in Okinawa was oriented, politically, toward the
lives of the Okinawans living on what became a U.S. military base, and, culturally, to
what Okinawa meant to him in terms of its traditions. The latter opened out to a
broadened interest in the culture of South Koreans, enabling him to further appreciate the
importance of Japan's peripheral cultures, which differed from Tokyo-centered culture.
This pursuit provided realistic substance to his study of Mikhail Bakhtin's theory
regarding a people's culture which led him to write The Silent Cry (1967), a work that ties
in the myths and history of the forest village with the contemporary age.
After The Silent Cry, two streams of thought, which at times flow as one, are apparent
and consistent in Oe's literary world. Starting with A Personal Matter is one group of
works that depicts his life of coexistence with his mentally-handicapped son, Hikari.
Teach Us to Outgrow our Madness (1969), a two-volume work, painfully portrays both
the agony-laden trials and errors he experiences in his life with his yet unspeaking infant
43
child, and his pursuit of his father he lost during the war. My Deluged Soul* (1973)
depicts a father who relates to his infant child who, through the medium of the songs of
the wild birds, has started to communicate with the family, and who empathizes with
youths that belong to a belligerent and radical political party. Rouse Up, O, Young Men of
the New Age!* (1983), a work in which Oe draws upon images from William Blake's
Prophecies, depicts his son Hikari's development from a child to a young man, and thus
crowns the works he wrote about his handicapped child.
The second group are stories in which Oe relates characters who he establishes in the
theater of the myths and history of his native forest village, but who interact closely with
life in today's cities. This world of Oe's fiction, starting with Bud- Nipping, Lamb-
Shooting and followed by The Silent Cry, came to shape the core of his entire literature.
Making full use of new ideas of cultural anthropology, these works represent the totality
of Oe's world of fiction, as evidenced in Letters to My Sweet Bygone Years (1987), a
work about a young man who, banking on his cosmology and world-view of Dante,
strives but fails to establish a politico- cultural base in the forest. Contemporary Games is
a story that alternates between myth and history, which Oe supports with the matriarch
and trickster principles he draws from cultural anthropology. He rewrote this work in
narrative form as M/T and the Wonders of the Forest* (1986). With the aid of W.B. Yeat's
poetic metaphors, Oe embarked on writing The Flaming Green Tree*, a trilogy
comprised of Until the 'Savior' Gets Socked* (1993), Vacillating* (1994), and On The
Great Day* (1995). Oe has announced that with the completion of this trilogy, he will
enter into his life's final stage of study, in which he will attempt a new form of literature.
The implication of this project is that Oe deems his effort at presenting his cosmology,
history and folk legend as having been brought to full circle, and that he has succeeded in
creating, through his portrayal of that place in the valley and its people, a model for this
contemporary age. It also implies that he considers Hikari's becoming a composer, in
actuality, surpasses the importance of his own literature about him.
Oe's winning the Nobel Prize for 1994 has thus encouraged him to embark on his pursuit
of a new form of literature and a new life for himself.
Translations into English

The Catch // Japan Quarterly, 6:1, 1959
Lavish are the Dead // Japan Quarterly, 12:2, 1965
A Personal Matter. – New York: Grove Press, 1968; London: W&N, 1969
The Silent Cry. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1974; – London: Serpernt's Tail, 1988
Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness. – New York: Grove Press, 1977 ; London : Serpent's
Tail, 1989
The Catch and other War Stories. – Tokyo ; New York : Kodansha International, 1981
The Pinch Runner Memorandum. – New York : M.E. Sharpe, 1994
Hiroshima Notes. – Tokyo : YMCA Press, 1981. Rev. ed. 1995
Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself : the Nobel Prize speech and other lectures. – Tokyo ;
New York : Kodansha International, 1995
44
Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids. – London ; New York : Marion Boyars, 1995
An Echo of Heaven. – Tokyo : Kodansha International, 1996
A Healing Family. – Tokyo : Kodansha International, 1996
A Quiet Life. – New York : Grove Press, 1996
Seventeen ; J : Two Novels. – New York : Blue Moon Books, 1996
Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! – New York : Grove Press, 2002
Somersault. – New York : Grove Press, 2003

"who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an
essential aspect of American reality"
Toni Morrison
USA
b. 1931
Born Chloe Anthony Wofford, in 1931 in Lorain (Ohio), the second of four children in a
black working-class family. Displayed an early interest in literature. Studied humanities
at Howard and Cornell Universities, followed by an academic career at Texas Southern
45
University, Howard University, Yale, and since 1989, a chair at Princeton University. She
has also worked as an editor for Random House, a critic, and given numerous public
lectures, specializing in African-American literature. She made her debut as a novelist in
1970, soon gaining the attention of both critics and a wider audience for her epic power,
unerring ear for dialogue, and her poetically-charged and richly-expressive depictions of
Black America. A member since 1981 of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she
has been awarded a number of literary distinctions, among them the Pulitzer Prize in
1988.
Bibliography
Novels
The Bluest Eye. – New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970
Sula. – New York: Knopf, 1973
Song of Solomon. – New York: Knopf, 1977
Tar Baby. – New York: Knopf, 1981
Beloved. – New York: Knopf, 1987
Jazz. – New York: Knopf, 1992
Paradise. – New York: Knopf, 1998
Love. – New York: Knopf, 2003
Miscellaneous
Dreaming Emmet (performed 1986, but unpublished)
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. – Cambridge,
Massachusetts; London, England: Harvard University Press 1992
Remember: The Journey to School Integration. – Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004
For children, with son Slade Morrison

The Big Box. – New York: Hyperion/Jump at the Sun, 1999
The Book of Mean People. – New York: Hyperion, 2002
The Lion or the Mouse?. – New York: Scribner, 2003
The Ant or the Grasshopper?. – New York: Scribner, 2003
The Poppy or the Snake?. – New York: Scribner, 2004
46

"for a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a
multicultural commitment"
Derek Walcott
Saint Lucia
b. 1930
Derek Walcott was born in 1930 in the town of Castries in Saint Lucia, one of the
Windward Islands in the Lesser Antilles. The experience of growing up on the isolated
volcanic island, an ex-British colony, has had a strong influence on Walcott's life and
work. Both his grandmothers were said to have been the descendants of slaves. His
father, a Bohemian watercolourist, died when Derek and his twin brother, Roderick, were
only a few years old. His mother ran the town's Methodist school. After studying at St.
Mary's College in his native island and at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica,
Walcott moved in 1953 to Trinidad, where he has worked as theatre and art critic. At the
age of 18, he made his debut with 25 Poems, but his breakthrough came with the
47
collection of poems, In a Green Night (1962). In 1959, he founded the Trinidad Theatre
Workshop which produced many of his early plays.
Walcott has been an assiduous traveller to other countries but has always, not least in his
efforts to create an indigenous drama, felt himself deeply-rooted in Caribbean society
with its cultural fusion of African, Asiatic and European elements. For many years, he has
divided his time between Trinidad, where he has his home as a writer, and Boston
University, where he teaches literature and creative writing.
Bibliography
Verse
25 Poems. – Port-of-Spain : Guardian Commercial Printery, 1948
Epitaph for the Young. Xll Cantos. – Bridgetown : Barbados Advocate, 1949
Poems. – Kingston, Jamaica : City Printery, 1951
In a Green Night. Poems 1948–60. – London : Cape, 1962
Selected Poems. – New York : Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1964
The Castaway and Other Poems. – London : Cape, 1965
The Gulf and Other Poems. – London : Cape, 1969
Another Life. – New York : Farrar, Straus, Giroux ; London : Cape, 1973
Sea Grapes. – London : Cape ; New York : Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1976
The Star-Apple Kingdom. – New York : Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1979
Selected Poetry. Ed. by Wayne Brown. – London : Heinemann, 1981
The Fortunate Traveller. – New York : Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1981
The Caribbean Poetry of Derek Walcott, and the Art of Romare Bearden. – New York :
Limited Editions Club, 1983
Midsummer. – New York : Farrar Straus Giroux, 1984
Collected Poems 1948-1984. New York, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1986
The Arkansas Testament. – New York, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1987
Omeros. – New York : Farrar Straus Giroux, 1990
The Bounty. – New York : Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1997
Tiepolo's Hound. – New York : Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2000
The Prodigal. – New York : Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2004
Selected Poems / edited by Edward Baugh. – New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007
Drama
Harry Dernier. – Bridgetown : Barbados Advocate, 1952
48
Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays. – New York : Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1970
The Joker of Seville & O Babylon!. – New York : Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1978
Remembrance & Pantomine : Two Plays. – New York : Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1980
Three Plays. – New York : Farrar Straus Giroux, 1986
The Odyssey : a Stage Version. – New York : Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1993
The Haitian Trilogy. – New York : Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2002. Content : Henri
Christophe ; The Haitian earth ; Drums and colours
Walker and The Ghost Dance. – New York : Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2002
Essays
The Antilles : Fragments of Epic Memory : the Nobel lecture. – New York : Farrar, Straus,
Giroux, 1993
What the Twilight Says : Essays. – New York : Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1998

"who through her magnificent epic writing has - in the words of Alfred Nobel - been of
very great benefit to humanity"
Nadine Gordimer
South Africa
b. 1923
Born in Springs, South Africa, 20/11/1923. Daughter of Isidore and Nan Gordimer. Has
lived all her life, and continues to live, in South Africa.
49
Principal works: 10 novels, including A Guest of Honour, The Conservationist, Burger's

Daughter, July's People, A Sport of Nature, My Son's Story and her most recent, None to
Accompany Me.
10 short story collections, the most recent Jump, published 1991, and Why Haven't You
Written: Selected Stories 1950-1972, published 1992.
Non-fiction: The Essential Gesture; On the Mines; The Black Interpreters.
Among honorary degrees: from Yale, Harvard, Columbia, New School for Social
Research, USA; University of Leuven, Belgium, University of York (England),
Universities of Cape Town and the Witwatersrand (South Africa), Cambridge University
(England).
Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France).
Vice-President of International PEN.
Bibliography
Novels
The Lying Days. – London : Gollancz, 1953
A World of Strangers. – London : Gollancz, 1958
Occasion for Loving. – London : Gollancz, 1963
The Late Bourgeois World. – New York : Viking, 1966
A Guest of Honour. – London : Cape, 1971
The Conservationist. – London : Cape, 1974
Burger's Daughter. – London : Cape, 1979
July's People. – New York : Viking, 1981
A Sport of Nature. – London : Cape, 1987
My Son's Story. – London : Bloomsbury, 1990
None to Accompany Me. – London : Bloomsbury, 1994
The House Gun. – New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998
The Pickup. – London : Bloomsbury, 2001
Get a Life. – New York : Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2005
Short Stories
Face to Face. – Johannesburg : Silver Leaf Books, 1949
The Soft Voice of the Serpent and Other Stories. – New York, Simon and Schuster, 1952
Six Feet of the Country: Fifteen Short Stories. – New York, Simon and Schuster, 1956
Friday's Footprint. – London : Gollancz, 1960
50
Not for Publication: Fifteen Stories. – London : Gollancz, 1965

Livingstone's Companions. – London : Jonathan Cape, 1972.
Selected Stories. – London : Cape, 1975
Some Monday for Sure. – London : Heinemann Educational, 1976
A Soldier's Embrace. – London : Cape, 1980
Something Out There. – London : Cape, 1984
Reflections of South Africa. – Herning : Systime, 1986
Crimes of Conscience: Selected Short Stories. – London : Heinemann, 1991
Jump and Other Stories. – London : Bloomsbury, 1991
Why Haven't You Written : Selected Stories 1950-1972. – New York : Viking, 1993
Harald, Claudia, and Their Son Duncan. – London : Bloomsbury, 1996
Loot and Other Stories. – London : Bloomsbury, 2003
Other (selection)
The Black Interpreters: Notes on African Writing. – Johannesburg : Spro-Cas/Ravan, 1973
The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places / edited and introduced by Stephen
Clingman. – London : Cape, 1988
Writing and Being. – Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard Univ. Press, 1995
Living in Hope and History: Notes from Our Century. – New York : Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1999

51
"for impassioned writing with wide horizons, characterized by sensuous intelligence and
humanistic integrity"
Octavio Paz
Mexico
b. 1914
d. 1998
Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City. On his father's side, his grandfather was a
prominent liberal intellectual and one of the first authors to write a novel with an
expressly Indian theme. Thanks to his grandfather's extensive library, Paz came into early
contact with literature. Like his grandfather, his father was also an active political
journalist who, together with other progressive intellectuals, joined the agrarian uprisings
led by Emiliano Zapata.
Paz began to write at an early age, and in 1937, he travelled to Valencia, Spain, to
participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers. Upon his return
to Mexico in 1938, he became one of the founders of the journal, Taller (Workshop), a
magazine which signaled the emergence of a new generation of writers in Mexico as well
as a new literary sensibility. In 1943, he travelled to the USA on a Guggenheim
Fellowship where he became immersed in Anglo-American Modernist poetry; two years
later, he entered the Mexican diplomatic service and was sent to France, where he wrote
his fundamental study of Mexican identity, The Labyrinth of Solitude, and actively
participated (together with Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret) in various activities and
publications organized by the surrealists. In 1962, Paz was appointed Mexican
ambassador to India: an important moment in both the poet's life and work, as witnessed
in various books written during his stay there, especially, The Grammarian Monkey and
East Slope. In 1968, however, he resigned from the diplomatic service in protest against
the government's bloodstained supression of the student demonstrations in Tlatelolco
during the Olympic Games in Mexico. Since then, Paz has continued his work as an
editor and publisher, having founded two important magazines dedicated to the arts and
politics: Plural (1971-1976) and Vuelta, which he has been publishing since 1976. In
1980, he was named honorary doctor at Harvard. Recent prizes include the Cervantes
award in 1981 - the most important award in the Spanish-speaking world - and the
52
prestigious American Neustadt Prize in 1982.
Paz is a poet and an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry
constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Eliot Weinberger has written that, for
Paz, "the revolution of the word is the revolution of the world, and that both cannot exist
without the revolution of the body: life as art, a return to the mythic lost unity of thought
and body, man and nature, I and the other." His is a poetry written within the perpetual
motion and transparencies of the eternal present tense. Paz's poetry has been collected in
Poemas 1935-1975 (1981) and Collected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987). A remarkable prose
stylist, Paz has written a prolific body of essays, including several book-length studies, in
poetics, literary and art criticism, as well as on Mexican history, politics and culture.

Selected Poems of Octavio Paz : a bilingual edition ... / translations by Muriel Rukeyser. –
Bloomington, Ind. : Indiana Univ. Press, 1963
The Other Mexico. – New York, 1972.
Alternating Current. – New York : Viking Press, 1973
The Bow and the Lyre : (El arco y la lira), the Poem, the Poetic Revelation, Poetry and
History / transl. by Ruth L.C. Simms. – Austin : Univ. of Texas P., cop. 1973
Early Poems 1935-1955 / translated from the Spanish by Muriel Rukeyser and other poets
... – Bloomington, Ind. : Indiana Univ. Press, 1974
The Siren & the Seashell and Other Essays on Poets and Poetry / transl. by Lysander
Kemp and Margaret Sayers Peden. – Austin: Univ. of Texas Press., cop. 1976
Marcel Duchamp : Appearance Stripped Bare / translated by Rachel Phillips and Donald
Gardner. – New York : Viking, cop. 1978
The Monkey Grammarian / translated from the Spanish by Helen R. Lane. New York :
Seaver Books, 1981
Selected Poems / edited by Eliot Weinberger ; translations from the Spanish by G. Aroul ...
[et al.]. – New York : New Directions, 1984
The Labyrinth of Solitude : Life and Thought in Mexiko / translated by Lysander Kemp. –
Harmondsworth : Penguin, 1985
One Earth, Four or Five Worlds : Reflections on Contemporary History / translated by
Helen R. Lane. – New York : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, cop. 1985
On Poets and Others / translated by Michael Schmidt. – New York : Seaver Books, cop.
1986
Sor Juana or, The Traps of Faith / translated by Margaret Sayers Peden. – Cambridge,
Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1988
The Collected Poems : 1957-1987 / edited and translated by Eliot Weinberger ; with
additional translations by Elizabeth Bishop ... – Manchester : Carcanet, 1988
Águila o sol? : Eagle or Sun? / translated from the Spanish by Eliot Weinberger. – London
: Peter Owen, 1990
Convergences : Essays on Art and Literature / translated from the Spanish by Helen Lane.
– London : Bloomsbury, 1990
53
The Other Voice : Essays on Modern Poetry / translated from the Spanish by Helen Lane.
– New York : Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1991
In Search of the Present : Nobel Lecture, 1990. – San Diego : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1991
The Double Flame : Essays on Love and Eroticism / translated from the Spanish by Helen
Lane. – London : Harvill, 1996
In Light of India : Essays / translated from the Spanish by Eliot Weinberger. – New York :
Harcourt Brace, 1997
Versiones y diversiones. – Ed. bilingüe, rev. y aum. – Barcelona : Galaxia Gutenberg ;
Círculo de Lectores, 2000

"for a rich and intensive prose, which with restrained compassion forms a challenging
vision of man's vulnerability"
54
Camilo José Cela

Spain
b. 1916
d. 2002
Camilo José Cela Trulock was born on 11 May, 1916, in Iria Flavia, district of Padron,
province of la Coruña.
Principal works:
Poetry: Pisando la dudosa luz del dia (1956; 1st ed. 1945).
Novels: La familia de Pascual Duarte (1942), Pabellón de reposo (1943), Nuevas

andanzas y desventuras de Lazarillo de Tormes (1944), La colmena (1951), Mrs.
Caldwell habla con su hijo (1952), La catira (1955), Tobogán de hambrientos (1962),
San Camilo I936 (1969), Oficio de tinieblas 5 (1973), Mazurca para dos muertos (1983),
Cristo versus Arizona (1988).
Novelettes: Timoteo, el incomprendido (1952), Santa Balbina, 37, gas en cada piso
(1952), Café de artistas (1953), El molino de viento (1956), La familia del héroe (1965),
El ciudadano Iscariote Reclús (1965).
Collections of short stories, fables, sketches, and miscellaneous writings: El gallego y su

cuadrilla (1949), Nuevo retablo de Don Cristobita (1957). Los viejos amigos (1960),
Gavilla de fabulas sin amor (1962), El solitario y los suerios de Quesada (1963), Toreo
de salon (1963), Once cuentos de futbol (1963), Izas, rabizas y colipoterrus (1964),
Nuevas escenas matritenses (seven series, 1965 and 1966), Rol de cornudos (1976).
Travel books: Viaje a la Alcarria (1948), Del Mino al Bidasoa (1952), Judios, moros y
cristianos (1956), Primer viaje andaluz (1959), Viaje al Pirineo de Lérida (1965), Nuevo
viaje a la Alcarria (1986).
55
Collections of articles: Mesa revuelta (1945),Cajón de sastre (1957), Cuatro figuras del
98 (1959), Garito de hospicianos (1963), Las companies convenientes (1963), Al servicio
de algo (1969), Los sueños vanos, los ángeles curiosos (1979), Los vasos comunicantes
(1981), Vuelta de hoja (1981), El juego de los tres madroños (1983), El asno de Buridán
(1986).
Plays: María Sabina (1967), El carro de heno o el inventor de la guillotina (1969).
Lexicographic works: Diccionario secreto (I, 1968; II, 1971).
Collected works: Obras completas. 25 vols. (1989-1990).
Founder and director of the journal Papeles de Son Armadans (1956-1979).
Doctor honoris causa at the universities of Syracuse (New York, USA), Birmingham
(Great Britain), John F. Kennedy (BuenosAires,Argentina), Palma de Mallorca, Santiago
de Compostela, the Interamericana University (San Juan, Puerto Rico), and the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem. Former professor at the University of Palma de Mallorca.
Member of the Real Academia Española.
Member of the Hispanic Society of America, the Society of Spanish and Spanish-
American Studies and the Académie du Monde Latin. Honorary member of the Real
Academia Gallega, the Real Academia de Buenas Letras (Barcelona), the Real Academia
de Bellas Artes de San Sebastián (Palma de Mallorca), the American Association of
Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese, the Cultural Institute Israel - Ibero-America, Spain
and Portugal (Jerusalem), the Asociación National de Profesores y Entrenadores de Judo
(Madrid), and the Asociación de la Prensa de Madrid (1979; after being expelled in
1952). Corresponding member of the Academia Porteea del lunfardo (Buenos Aires),
president of the Amistad España - Israel association (Madrid), honorary president of the
Cultura Latinaassociation (Paris).
Honorary postman. Honorary doctor of forensic medicine. Senator by royal appointment

in the constituent assembly (1977-1978).
Favourite son of Padron. Adopted son of Palma de Mallorca, of Madrid and of Torremejia
(Badajoz). Honorary citizen of the State of Texas.
Awards and honours: Premio de la Crítica, Premio National de Literatura, Gran Cruz de
la Orden de Isabel la Caólica, Premio Principe de Asturias.

The Hive / translated by J.M. Cohen in consultation with Arturo Barea. – New York :
Farrar, Straus and Young, 1953. – Translation of La colmena
The Family of Pascual Duarte / translated and with an introd. by Anthony Kerrigan. –
Boston : Little, Brown, 1964. – Translation of La familia de Pascual Duarte
56
Journey to the Alcarria / translated by Frances M. López-Morillas. – Madison, University

of Wisconsin Press, 1964. – Translation of Viaje a la Alcarria
Pascual Duarte and His Family / translated by Herma Briffault. – New York : Las
Americas Pub. Co, 1965. – Translation of La familia de Pascual Duarte
Mrs. Caldwell Speaks to Her Son / Mrs. Caldwell habla con su hijo, in the authorized
English translation and with an introd. by J. S. Bernstein. – Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell
University Press, 1968. – Translation of Mrs. Caldwell habla con su hijo
San Camilo, 1936 : the Eve, Feast, and Octave of St. Camillus of the year 1936 in Madrid
/ translated by J.H.R. Polt. – Durham : Duke University Press, 1991. – Translation of
Visperas, festividad y octava de San Camilo del año 1936 en Madrid
Mazurka for Two Dead Men / translated by Patricia Haugaard. – New York : New
Directions, 1992. – Translation of Mazurca para dos muertos
Boxwood / translated by Patricia Haugaard. – New York : New Directions, 2002. –
Translation of Madera de boj

"who, through works rich in nuance - now clear-sightedly realistic, now evocatively
ambiguous - has formed an Arabian narrative art that applies to all mankind"
57
Naguib Mahfouz
Egypt
b. 1911
d. 2006
Born in Cairo in 1911, Naguib Mahfouz began writing when he was seventeen. His first
novel was published in 1939 and ten more were written before the Egyptian Revolution
of July 1952, when he stopped writing for several years. One novel was republished in
1953, however, and the appearance of the Cairo Triology, Bayn al Qasrayn, Qasr al
Shawq, Sukkariya (Between-the-Palaces, Palace of Longing, Sugarhouse) in 1957 made
him famous throughout the Arab world as a depictor of traditional urban life. With The
Children of Gebelawi (1959), he began writing again, in a new vein that frequently
concealed political judgements under allegory and symbolism. Works of this second
period include the novels, The Thief and the Dogs (1961), Autumn Quail (1962), Small
Talk on the Nile (1966), and Miramar (1967), as well as several collections of short
stories.
Until 1972, Mahfouz was employed as a civil servant, first in the Ministry of Mortmain
Endowments, then as Director of Censorship in the Bureau of Art, as Director of the
Foundation for the Support of the Cinema, and, finally, as consultant on Cultural Affairs
to the Ministry of Culture. The years since his retirement from the Egyptian bureaucracy
have seen an outburst of further creativity, much of it experimental. He is now the author
of no fewer than thirty novels, more than a hundred short stories, and more than two
hundred articles. Half of his novels have been made into films which have circulated
throughout the Arabic-speaking world. In Egypt, each new publication is regarded as a
major cultural event and his name is inevitably among the first mentioned in any literary
discussion from Gibraltar to the Gulf.
Bibliography
58
Midaq Alley / translated from Arabic by Trevor Le Gassick. – Cairo : The American
University in Cairo Press, cop. 1966
God's World : an Anthology of Short Stories / transl. with an introd. by Akef Abadir and
Roger Allen. – Minneapolis : Bibl. Islamica, 1973
Mirrors : a novel / transl. from the Arabic by Roger Allen. – Minneapolis : Bibl. Islamica,
1977
Miramar / edited and revised by Maged el Kommos, John Rodenbeck ; translated by
Fatma Moussa Mahmoud. – Cairo : The American University in Cairo Press, 1978
Children of Gebelawi / transl. by Philip Stewart. – London : Heinemann, 1981
The Thief and the Dogs / translated by Trevor Le Gassick, M.M. Badawi ; revised by John
Rodenbeck. – Cairo : The American University in Cairo Press, 1984
Wedding Song / introduction by Mursi Saad El Din, translated from Arabic by Olive E.
Kenny ; edited and revised by Mursi Saad El Din and John Rodenbeck. – Cairo : The
American University in Cairo Press, 1984
Autumn Quail / translated by Roger Allen ; revised by John Rodenbeck. – Cairo : The
The Beginning and the End / edited by Mason Rossiter Smith ; translated by Ramses
Awad. – Cairo : The American University in Cairo Press, 1985
The Beggar / translated by Kristin Walker Henry and Nariman Khales Naili al-Warraki. –
Cairo : The American University in Cairo Press, 1986
Respected Sir / translated by Rasheed El-Enany. – Cairo : The American University in
Cairo Press, 1987
The Search / edited by Magdi Wahba translated by Mohamed Islam. – Cairo : The
American University in Cairo Press, cop. 1987
Fountain and Tomb / translated from the Arabic by Soad Sobhy, Essam Fattouh, James
Kenneson. – Washington, D.C. : Three Continents Press, 1988
The Day the Leader Was Killed : a novel / translated with an introduction by Malak
Hashem. – Cairo : General Egyptian Book Organization, 1989
Palace Walk / translated by William M. Hutchins and Olive E. Kenny. – Cairo : The
Palace of Desire / translated by William Maynard Hutchins, Lorne M. Kenny, Olive E.
Kenny. – London : Doubleday, 1991
The Time and the Place and Other Stories / selected and translated by Denys Johnson-
Davies. – New York : Doubleday, 1991
The Journey of Ibn Fattouma / translated by Denys Johnson-Davies. – New York :
Doubleday, 1992
Sugar Street / translated by William Maynard Hutchins and Angele Botros Samaan. –
New York : Doubleday, 1992
Adrift on the Nile / translated by Frances Liardet. – New York : Doubleday, 1993
The Harafish / translated by Catherine Cobham. – New York : Doubleday, 1994
Arabian Nights and Days / translated by Denys Johnson-Davies. – London : Doubleday,
1995
59
Children of the Alley / translated by Peter Theroux. – New York : Doubleday, 1996
Echoes of an Autobiography / translated by Denys Johnson-Davies. – New York :
Doubleday, 1997
Akhenaten, Dweller in Truth / translated by Tagreid Abu-Hassabo. – New York : Anchor
Books, 2000
The Cairo Trilogy / translated by William Maynard Hutchins ... [et al.] ; with an
introduction by Sabry Hafez. – New York : Knopf, 2001. – Content: Palace walk ; Palace
of desire ; Sugar street
Naguib Mahfouz at Sidi Gaber : Reflections of a Nobel laureate, 1994-2001 : from
Conversations with Mohamed Salmawy . – Cairo : The American University in Cairo
Press ; Chichester : Wiley, 2001
Khufu's Wisdom / translated by Raymond Stock. – Cairo : The American University in
Cairo Press, 2003
Rhadopis of Nubia / translated by Anthony Calderbank. – Cairo : The American
University in Cairo Press, 2003
Thebes at War / translated by Humphrey Davies. – Cairo : The American University in
Cairo Press, 2003
Voices from the Other World : Ancient Egyptian Tales / translated by Raymond Stock. –
Cairo : The American University in Cairo Press ; London : Eurospan, 2003
The Dreams / translated by Raymond Stock. – Cairo : The American University in Cairo
Press, 2004

"for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity"
60
Joseph Brodsky
USA
b. 1940
(in Leningrad, then USSR)
d. 1996
Joseph Brodsky was born in 1940, in Leningrad, and began writing poetry when he was
eighteen. Anna Akhmatova soon recognized in the young poet the most gifted lyric voice
of his generation. From March 1964 until November 1965, Brodsky lived in exile in the
Arkhangelsk region of northern Russia; he had been sentenced to five years in exile at
hard labor for "social parasitism," but did not serve out his term.
Four of Brodsky's poems were published in Leningrad anthologies in 1966 and 1967, but
most of his work has appeared only in the West. He is a splendid poetic translator and has
translated into Russian, among others, the English metaphysical poets, and the Polish
emigre poet, Czeslaw Milosz. His own poetry has been translated into at least ten
languages. Joseph Brodsky: Selected Poems was published by Penguin Books in London
(1973), and by Harper & Row in New York (1974), translated by George L. Kline and
with a foreword by W.H. Auden. A volume of Brodsky's selected poems translated in
French has been published by Gallimard; a German translation, by Piper Verlag; and an
Italian translation, by Mondadori and Adelphi. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux published
Brodsky's acclaimed collection, A Part of Speech, in 1980.
On June 4, 1972, Joseph Brodsky became an involuntary exile from his native country.
After brief stays in Vienna and London, he came to the United States. He has been Poet-
in-Residence and Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan, Queens College,
Smith College, Columbia University, and Cambridge University in England. He currently
is Five College Professor of Literature at Mount Holyoke College. In 1978, Brodsky was
awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters at Yale University, and on May 23,
1979, he was inducted as a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and
Letters. In 1981, Brodsky was a recipient of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur
Foundation's award for his works of "genius".
In 1986, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux published Less Than One, a collection of Mr.
61
Brodsky's essays on the arts and politics, which won the National Book Critic's Award for
Criticism.
In 1988 Farrar, Straus, and Giroux published a collection of his poetry, To Urania, and in
1992 a collection of essays about Venice, Watermark.
Works in English (including translations into English)

Elegy for John Donne and Other Poems / selected, translated, and introduced by Nicholas
William Bethell. – London : Longman, 1967
Velka elegie. – Paris : Edice Svedectvi, 1968
Poems. – Ann Arbor, Mich. : Ardis, 1972
Selected Poems / translated from the Russian by George L. Kline. New York: Harper &
Row, 1973
Poems and Translations. – Keele: University of Keele, 1977
A Part of Speech. – New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980
Verses on the Winter Campaign 1980 / translation by Alan Meyers. – London : Anvil
Press, 1981
Less Than One: Selected Essays. – New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986
To Urania : Selected Poems, 1965-1985. – New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988
Marbles : a Play in Three Acts / translated by Alan Myers with Joseph Brodsky. – New
York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989
Watermark. – New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992
On Grief and Reason: Essays. – New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995
So Forth : Poems. – New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996
Discovery. – New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999
Collected Poems in English, 1972-1999 / edited by Ann Kjellberg. – New York: Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, 2000
Nativity Poems / translated by Melissa Green ... – New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
2001

"who in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones fashions the drama of
existence"
62
Wole Soyinka
Nigeria
b. 1934
Wole Soyinka was born on 13 July 1934 at Abeokuta, near Ibadan in western Nigeria.
After preparatory university studies in 1954 at Government College in Ibadan, he
continued at the University of Leeds, where, later, in 1973, he took his doctorate. During
the six years spent in England, he was a dramaturgist at the Royal Court Theatre in
London 1958-1959. In 1960, he was awarded a Rockefeller bursary and returned to
Nigeria to study African drama. At the same time, he taught drama and literature at
various universities in Ibadan, Lagos, and Ife, where, since 1975, he has been professor
of comparative literature. In 1960, he founded the theatre group, "The 1960 Masks" and
in 1964, the "Orisun Theatre Company", in which he has produced his own plays and
taken part as actor. He has periodically been visiting professor at the universities of
Cambridge, Sheffield, and Yale.
During the civil war in Nigeria, Soyinka appealed in an article for cease-fire. For this he
was arrested in 1967, accused of conspiring with the Biafra rebels, and was held as a
political prisoner for 22 months untill 1969. Soyinka has published about 20 works:
drama, novels and poetry. He writes in English and his literary language is marked by
great scope and richness of words.
As dramatist, Soyinka has been influenced by, among others, the Irish writer, J.M. Synge,
but links up with the traditional popular African theatre with its combination of dance,
music, and action. He bases his writing on the mythology of his own tribe-the Yoruba-
with Ogun, the god of iron and war, at the centre. He wrote his first plays during his time
in London, The Swamp Dwellers and The Lion and the Jewel (a light comedy), which
were performed at Ibadan in 1958 and 1959 and were published in 1963. Later, satirical
comedies are The Trial of Brother Jero (performed in 1960, publ. 1963) with its sequel,
Jero's Metamorphosis (performed 1974, publ. 1973), A Dance of the Forests (performed
1960, publ.1963), Kongi's Harvest (performed 1965, publ. 1967) and Madmen and
Specialists (performed 1970, publ. 1971). Among Soyinka's serious philosophic plays are
(apart from "The Swamp Dwellers") The Strong Breed (performed 1966, publ. 1963), The
Road ( 1965) and Death and the King's Horseman (performed 1976, publ. 1975). In The
63
Bacchae of Euripides (1973), he has rewritten the Bacchae for the African stage and in
Opera Wonyosi (performed 1977, publ. 1981), bases himself on John Gay's Beggar's
Opera and Brecht's The Threepenny Opera. Soyinka's latest dramatic works are A Play of
Giants (1984) and Requiem for a Futurologist (1985).
Soyinka has written two novels, The Interpreters (1965), narratively, a complicated work
which has been compared to Joyce's and Faulkner's, in which six Nigerian intellectuals
discuss and interpret their African experiences, and Season of Anomy (1973) which is
based on the writer's thoughts during his imprisonment and confronts the Orpheus and
Euridice myth with the mythology of the Yoruba. Purely autobiographical are The Man
Died: Prison Notes (1972) and the account of his childhood, Aké ( 1981), in which the
parents' warmth and interest in their son are prominent. Literary essays are collected in,
among others, Myth, Literature and the African World (1975).
Soyinka's poems, which show a close connection to his plays, are collected in Idanre,
and Other Poems (1967), Poems from Prison (1969), A Shuttle in the Crypt (1972) the
long poem Ogun Abibiman (1976) and Mandela's Earth and Other Poems (1988).
Bibliography
Works
Plays
A Dance of the Forests. – London : Oxford Univ. Press, 1963
The Lion and the Jewel. – London : Oxford Univ. Press, 1963
Three Plays. – Evanston, IL, 1962. – Content: The Trials of Brother Jero ; The Strong
Breed ; The Swamp Dwellers
Five Plays. – London : Oxford Univ Press, 1964. – Content: A Dance of the Forests ; The
Lion and the Jewel ; The Swamp Dwellers ; The Trials of Brother Jero ; The Strong Breed
The Road. – London : Oxford Univ. Press, 1965
Kongi's Harvest. – London : Oxford Univ. Press, 1967 (1966?)
Three Short Plays. – London : Oxford Univ. Press, 1969
Madmen and Specialists. – London : Methuen, 1971
The Jero Plays. – London : Eyre Methuen, cop. – 1973. – Content: The Trials of Brother
Jero ; Jero's Metamorphosis
Camwood on the Leaves. – London : Eyre Methuen, 1973
Collected Plays. – London : Oxford Univ. Press, 1973-1974. – 2 vol.
Death and the King's Horseman. – London : Eyre Methuen, 1975
Opera Wonyosi. – Bloomington : Indiana Univ. Press, 1981
A Play of Giants. – London : Methuen, 1984
Requiem for a Futurologist. – London : Rex Colling, 1985
From Zia, With Love ; and, A Scourge of Hyacints. – London : Methuen drama, 1992
64
King Baabu : a Play in the Manner - Roughly - of Alfred Jarry. – London : Methuen, 2002
Poetry
Idanre & Other Poems. – London : Methuen, 1967
Poems From Prison. – London : Rex Collings, 1969
A Shuttle in the Crypt. – London : Rex Collings/Eyre Methuen, cop. – 1972. – Expanded
edition of Poems from Prison
Ogun Abibimañ. – London : Rex Collings, 1976
Mandela's Earth and Other Poems. – New York : Random House, cop. – 1988
Early Poems. – New York : Oxford University Press, 1997. – Content: Idanre & Other
Poems ; A Shuttle in the Crypt
Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known. – London : Methuen, 2002
Novels
The Interpreters. – London : Andre Deutsch, 1965
The Man Died : Prison Notes. – London : Rex Collings, 1972
Season of Anomy. – London : Rex Collings, 1973

"who in his novel combines the poet's and the painter's creativeness with a deepened
awareness of time in the depiction of the human condition"
65
Claude Simon
France
b. 1913
d. 2005
Claude Simon was born in 1913 at Tananarive (Madagascar). His parents were French,
his father being a career officer who was killed in the first World War. He grew up with
his mother and her family in Perpignan in the middle of the wine district of Roussillon.
Among his ancestors was a general from the time of the French Revolution.
After secondary school at Collège Stanislas in Paris and brief sojourns at Oxford and
Cambridge he took courses in painting at the André Lhote Academy. He then travelled
extensively through Spain, Germany, the Soviet Union, Italy and Greece. This experience
as well as those from the Second World War 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. He managed to escape and joined the resistance movement. At the same
time he completed his first novel, Le Tricheur ("The Cheat", published in 1946), which
he had started to write before the war.
He lives in Paris and spends part of the year at Salses in the Pyrenees.
In 1961 Claude Simon received the prize of l'Express for "La Route des Flandres" and in
1967 the Médicis prize for "Histoire". The University of East Anglia made him honorary
doctor in 1973.

The Wind / translated by Richard Howard. – New York : Braziller, 1959
The Grass / translated by Richard Howard. – New York : Braziller 1960
The Flanders Road / translated from the French by Richard Howard. – New York :
Braziller, 1961
The Palace / translated from the French by Richard Howard. – New York : Braziller, 1963
66
Histoire / translated from the French by Richard Howard. – New York : Braziller, 1968
The Battle of Pharsalus / translated from the French by Richard Howard. – New York :
Braziller, 1971
Conducting Bodies / translated from the French by Helen R. Lane. – New York, Viking
Press, 1974
Triptych / translated from the French by Helen R. Lane. – New York : Viking Press, 1976
The World About Us / translated from the French by Daniel Weissbort. – Princeton, N.J. :
Ontario Review Press, 1983
The Georgics / translated by Beryl and John Fletcher. – New York : Riverrun Press, 1989
The Acacia / translated from the French by Richard Howard. – New York : Pantheon
Books, 1990
The Invitation / translated by Jim Cross. – Elmwood Park, IL : Dalkey Archive Press,
1991
The Jardin des Plantes / translated from the French and with an introduction by Jordan
Stump. – Evanston, Ill. : Northwestern University Press, 2001
The Trolley / translated from the French by Richard Howard. – New York : New Press,
2002

"for his poetry which endowed with freshness, sensuality and rich inventiveness provides
a liberating image of the indomitable spirit and versatility of man"
67
Jaroslav Seifert
Czechoslovakia
b. 1901
d. 1986
Jaroslav Seifert was born on 23 September 1901 into a working-class family living in
Zizkov, a suburb of Prague. He attended secondary school and soon began devoting
himself to writing poetry and to journalism. He made his debut in 1918; he published his
first collection of poems in 192 1. He belonged to the extreme left wing of the Social
Democratic Party, which, in 1921, was to form the core of the Communist Party in newly
formed Czechoslovakia. He became an editor of communist newspapers and magazines
(Rovnost, Srsatec, Reflektor) while, at the same time, working at the communist
publishing house and bookstore. In the 1920s he was a leading representative of the
Czechoslovakian artistic avant-garde; he served on the editorial staffs of several of its
publications. He translated from the French (Apollinaire, Verlaine, and others). In March
1929, together with six other important communist writers, he signed a manifesto
protesting against Bolshevik tendencies in the new leadership of Czechoslovakia's
Communist Party, and together with his fellow signers, he was expelled from the party.
From 1930, he served in various editorial posts within the social democratic press (Pestré
kvety, Ranní noviny). During the German occupation, he was editor of the daily Národní
práce and after 1945, of the trade-union daily Práce. During the years 1945-1948, he
edited the literary monthly Kytice. Since 1949, when he was forced to leave journalism,
he has devoted himself exclusively to literature. In 1936, 1955, and 1968, his poetry was
awarded state prizes. In 1967, he was designated National Artist. In 1968, he was elected
to the post of Chairman of the Czechoslovakian Writers' Union. During the years 1969-
1970, he was Chairman of the Czech Writers' Union.
Jaroslav Seifert died in 1986.

The Plague Column / translated from the Czech by Ewald Osers. – London: Terra Nova
Editions, 1979
68
Morovy sloup = The Plague Monument / translated by Lyn Coffin. – Silver Spring, Md:
SVU, 1980
The Casting of Bells / translated from the Czech by Paul Jagasich & Tom O'Grady. – Iowa
City: The Spirit That Moves Us Press, 1983
An Umbrella from Piccadilly / translated from the Czech by Ewald Osers. – London:
London Magazine Editions, 1983
Eight Days : An Elegy for Thomas Masaryk / translated by Jagasich and O'Grady. – Iowa
City, IA: Spirit That Moves Us, 1985
Mozart v Praze = Mozart in Prague / translated by Jagasich and O'Grady. – Iowa City, IA
Spirit That Moves Us, 1985
The Selected Poetry of Jaroslav Seifert / translated by Ewald Osers, edited and with
additional translations by George Gibian. – New York: Macmillan, 1986
A Wreath of Sonnets = Venec sonetu / translated from the Czech by J.K. Klement and Eva
Stucke. – Toronto, On.: Larkwood Books, 1987
The Early Poetry of Jaroslav Seifert / translated by Dana Loewy. – Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press, 1997
The Poetry of Jaroslav Seifert / translated from the Czech by Ewald Osers ; edited and
with prose translations by George Gibian. – North Haven, CT: Catbird Press, 1998

Premiile Nobel Pentru Literatură 1984 - 2007

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1

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