José Saramago was born to landless peasants in Azinhaga, Portugal in 1922. He grew up and spent his formative years under the Estado Novo (New State) regime. Estado Novo was a fascist, corporatist, and conservative government. The exploitation or Portuguese peasants by the ruling class lead Saramago to become a staunch communist and an atheist. In what may be a rather large understatement, the politics of Saramago's time greatly influenced his life and work.
Collecting Nobel Prize in Literature winners makes sense: there’s a list to follow; a new author is chosen each year from all around the globe, allowing for an eclectic reach; and your collection will be filled with the best of the best. Today, we continue our efforts to spotlight Nobel laureates as we feature two German winners. Read on for tips and tricks for collecting the works of Gerhart Hauptmann and Günter Grass.
Ivo Andrić was a novelist from the former Yugoslavia who gained international acclaim for his novel The Bridge on the Drina (1945), which takes place over four centuries in the northern Bosnian town of Višegrad. For his literary contributions, Andrić won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1961. Recently, Emir Kusturica, a Serbian filmmaker, became involved in a project to commemorate the novelist. Along the Drina in Višegrad, Kusturica has been central in the creation of Andrićgrad — a town named in honor of Ivo Andrić.
Günter Grass, who won the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature, died earlier this year, at the age of 87. He maintained a complicated attitude toward the country of Germany for all his life. Grass was a true agitator; he was almost always political, polemical, and provocative. Consequently, upon his death many obituaries concerned themselves with his political controversies, of which there were certainly a good deal. But of course, Grass was a multifaceted person and artist. On the 88th anniversary of his birth, we peel back the divisive persona, and take a look at the legacy of Günter Grass.
If you’re interested in traveling to Chile and visiting the homes of the Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda, you’ll need to plan to make your way to three different properties in three different cities. Indeed, Neruda had a home in Santiago, the capital of Chile, as well as two other properties in Valparaiso and Isla Negra. Each is now maintained by the Fundación Pablo Neruda. If you decide to make the treks, we promise it’s worth it.
Considered alongside its fellow awards, the Nobel Peace Prize can seem a little vague. While the Nobel Prize in Literature, for example, has often been the subject of controversy, it, like the awards for physics and chemistry, is fairly straightforward. As with those aimed at breakthroughs in the sciences, the award for literature is ostensibly awarded to those achieving the most impressive new heights in the field.
The Nobel Peace Prize, on the other hand, while not referring to a discreet discipline in and of itself, has long been considered a bit nebulous in its intent. Despite that, the Peace Prize has been the highest honor the world bestows upon its most luminary minds — from Dr. Martin Luther King and the Dalai Lama to Malala Yousafzai and Jimmy Carter — for more than a century.
Awarded each year since 1901 (except in 1914, 1918, 1935, 1940, 1941, 1942, and 1943), the Nobel Prize in Literature is an obvious litmus test for exceptional writers. While there have, of course, been a fair share of “snubs” in the past 100+ years, many of the greatest authors in recent history bear the title "Nobel laureate." As a result, collecting Nobel Prize winners makes good sense: there’s a list to follow; a new author is chosen each year from all around the globe, allowing for an eclectic reach (many congratulations to the 2015 winner from Belarus, Svetlana Alexievich!); and your collection will be filled with the best of the best. We thought we’d offer some advice for fledgling collectors and seasoned collectors alike as you go about putting together your noble Nobel collection.
It wasn’t easy for David Lean to bring Boris Pasternak’s twentieth-century epic Doctor Zhivago (1965) to the silver screen. Despite the fact that Lean had already won critical acclaim with previous films like The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Lean’s adaptation of the sweeping Russian novel came with difficulties and triumphs. For starters, the movie cost $11 million and took three years to make — no small amount of money or length of time for a cinematic feature in 1965.
In an early issue of Life Magazine from 1966, a reviewer described Lean’s film as one in which the director “flung onto the screen both the chaos and the compassion — the devastation of history’s onrush and its splintering effects on the people caught up in it.” To be sure, the feature closely follows the narrative of the Nobel Prize-winning novel. But do you want to know some interesting secrets about the making of Doctor Zhivago? If yes, keep reading.
Before Elena Ferrante, there was Grazia Deledda. Yet the considerable fame Ferrante has accrued in the past few years is likely eclipsed by that which Deledda had in her lifetime. Once infamous on her home island of Sardinia, she became a national treasure almost overnight. Deledda won the Nobel Prize in 1926, making her the second woman (and Italian) to do so. Visitors and reporters flooded her house in the following weeks. Benito Mussolini, who was just beginning to inaugurate fascist Italy, adored her. He even planned to present an autographed portrait of himself to the author, signed: “with profound admiration.”
“What we have to do is to bring poetry into the world in which the audience lives and to which it returns when it leaves the theatre.” — T.S. Eliot
Nobel Prize-winning poet T.S. Eliot has an influence that is likely too large and too all-encompassing to be measured. It includes nearly every poet who has come after him and some who came before, from Ezra Pound (whose own later work would come to draw influence from that of his protégé) to Billy Collins. What fewer people realize, however, is that Eliot’s influence extended beyond verse and into drama. Indeed, he proved to be one of the last century’s most vocal proponents of the revival of the poetic drama, a genre largely ignored since Elizabethan playwrights like Shakespeare and Ben Jonson.
