Since it is very much in the air this week, Jon Fosse having just won the 2023 Nobel Prize for Literature, I’m choosing five earlier Nobel laureates who are among my favourite authors for this week’s list. (The quotations citing the reasons for the awards come from Wikipedia.)
2018: Olga Tokarczuk
Tokarczuk was awarded the prize "for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life." I was introduced to her work through the 2009 novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, and immediately had to erect a plinth in my private literary pantheon to honour a new deity.
2017: Kazuo Ishiguro
Ishiguro, "who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world," is probably most widely known for The Remains of the Day. His When We Were Orphans is, like Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow… is in the form of a mystery story, which always doubly endears me to a work of literature.
1998: José Saramago
I’ve mentioned Saramago before in a blog post: my tastes intersect at several points with the work of this author "who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality." An element of the fantastic, a degree of experimentalism in the writing, and the archival setting of All the Names are the sorts of things to which I am most receptive.
1969: Samuel Beckett
Beckett was awarded his prize "for his writing, which – in new forms for the novel and drama – in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation." Along with James Joyce and Flann O’Brien (Brian O’Nolan), he is one of the towering triumvirate of Irish modernist literature. He lived in Paris for most of his adult life, and wrote many of his works, including Waiting for Godot, in French.
1923: W.B. Yeats
In the year after Ireland gained independence, Yeats was awarded the prize "for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation." One of the most widely known English-language poets of the 20th Century, he was also a prominent esotericist. But even someone so attuned to the otherworldly might not have foreseen that one of his most esoterically informed poems, The Second Coming, would be quoted by beings and in worlds far beyond our earthly realm…
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