Władysław Reymont & Per Hallström
Gabriel García Márquez
Malala Yousafzai
Giosuè Carducci & C.D. af Wirsén
Wisława Szymborska
William Golding
Борис Пастернак (Boris Pasternak) & Anders Österling
Иван Бунин (Ivan Bunin)
Toni Morrison
René-François Sully-Prudhomme & C.D. af Wirsén
Patrick Modiano
Joseph Brodsky (Иосиф Бродский)
Alice Munro &
Tomas Tranströmer & & & Roland Pontinen & &
Doris Lessing
Wole Soyinka
José Saramago
Dario Fo
Octavio Paz
Naguib Mahfouz
Seamus Heaney
Patrick White &
Vicente Aleixandre
Eugenio Montale
Samuel Beckett &
Pablo Neruda
Juan Ramón Jiménez &
Giorgos Seferis
Saint-John Perse
Hermann Hesse &
Halldór Laxness
Albert Camus
Bertrand Russell
Pär Lagerkvist
Winston Churchill &
Thomas Mann
Frans Eemil Sillanpää & Per Hallström
André Gide &
Erik Axel Karlfeldt & Anders Österling
George Bernard Shaw & Per Hallström
John Galsworthy & Anders Österling
Sinclair Lewis
Henri Bergson
Paul Heyse
Romain Rolland & Sven Söderman
Karl Gjellerup & Sven Söderman
Rabindranath Tagore &
Knut Hamsun
Carl Spitteler &
Rudyard Kipling & C.D. af Wirsén
Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson
C.D. af Wirsén
Henryk Sienkiewicz
Theodore Roosevelt
Johannes Stark
Max Planck
Albert Einstein
Martin Luther King Jr.
T.S. Eliot
Bob Dylan
Eugene O’Neill & J.R. &
Salvatore Quasimodo
Gabriela Mistral
Verner von Heidenstam & Sven Söderman
Maurice Maeterlinck &
Derek Walcott
Nelson Mandela
Ernest Hemingway
Nadine Gordimer
Robot Koch
Ivan Pavlov
Albert Einstein
Hemingway was not present to receive this award because of “ill health.” He had just recently been in two consecutive plane crashes that damaged him both physically and mentally. Hemingway recorded the speech in his own voice at a later date.
Having no facility for speech-making and no command of oratory nor any domination of rhetoric, I wish to thank the administrators of the generosity of Alfred Nobel for this Prize.
No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the Prize can accept it other than with humility. There is no need to list these writers. Everyone here may make his own list according to his knowledge and his conscience.
It would be impossible for me to ask the Ambassador of my country to read a speech in which a writer said all of the things which are in his heart. Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten.
Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.
For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.
How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.
I have spoken too long for a writer. A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it. Again I thank you.
Ernest Hemingway released 1954 Nobel Acceptance Speech on Mon Dec 10 1945.