Nobel laureates in Literature
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Kazuo Ishiguro was born on 8 November 1954 in Nagasaki, Japan. He is a writer and producer, known for Living (2022), Never Let Me Go (2010) and The Remains of the Day (1993). He has been married to Lorna Anne MacDougall since 1986. They have one child.- Music Artist
- Music Department
- Composer
Robert Allen Zimmerman was born 24 May 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota; his father Abe worked for the Standard Oil Co. Six years later the family moved to Hibbing, often the coldest place in the US, where he taught himself piano and guitar and formed several high school rock bands. In 1959 he entered the University of Minnesota and began performing as Bob Dylan at clubs in Minneapolis and St. Paul. The following year he went to New York, performed in Greenwich Village folk clubs, and spent much time in the hospital room of his hero Woody Guthrie. Late in 1961 Columbia signed him to a contract and the following year released his first album, containing two original songs. Next year "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" appeared, with all original songs including the 1960s anthem "Blowin' in the Wind." After several more important acoustic/folk albums, and tours with Joan Baez, he launched into a new electric/acoustic format with 1965's "Bringing It All Back Home" which, with The Byrds' cover of his "Mr Tambourine Man," launched folk-rock. The documentary Bob Dylan: Dont Look Back (1967) was filmed at this time; he broke off his relationship with Baez and by the end of the year had married Sara Dylan (born Sara Lowndes). Nearly killed in a motorcycle accident 29 July 1966, he withdrew for a time of introspection. After more hard rock performances, his next albums were mostly country. With his career wandering (and critics condemning the fact), Sam Peckinpah asked him to compose the score for, and appear in, his Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973) - more memorable as a soundtrack than a film. In 1974 he and The Band went on tour, releasing his first #1 album, "Planet Waves". It was followed a year later by another first-place album, "Blood on the Tracks". After several Rolling Thunder tours, the unsuccessful film Renaldo and Clara (1978) and a divorce, he stunned the music world again by his release of the fundamentalist Christrian album "Slow Train Coming," a cut from which won him his first Grammy. Many tours and albums later, on the eve of a European tour May 1997, he was stricken with histoplasmosis (a possibly fatal infection of the heart sac); he recovered and appeared in Bologna that September at the request of the Pope. In December he received the Kennedy Center Award for artistic excellence.- Additional Crew
- Writer
Svetlana Alexievich was born on 31 May 1948 in Stanislav, Ukrainian SSR, USSR [now Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine]. She is a writer, known for Voices from Chernobyl (2016), Chernobyl (2019) and Vassia (2017).- Writer
- Actor
Patrick Modiano was born on 30 July 1945 in Boulogne-Billancourt, Hauts-de-Seine, France. He is a writer and actor, known for Bon Voyage (2003), Lacombe, Lucien (1974) and Une jeunesse (1983). He has been married to Dominique Zehrfuss since 12 September 1970. They have two children.- Alice Munro was born on 10 July 1931 in Wingham, Ontario, Canada. She was a writer, known for Julieta (2016), Free Radicals and Runaway. She was married to Gerald Fremlin and James Munro (I). She died on 13 May 2024 in Port Hope, Ontario, Canada.
- Mo Yan (a pseudonym for Guan Moye) was born in 1955 and grew up in Gaomi in Shandong province in north-eastern China. His parents were farmers. As a twelve-year-old during the Cultural Revolution he left school to work, first in agriculture, later in a factory. In 1976 he joined the People's Liberation Army and during this time began to study literature and write. His first short story was published in a literary journal in 1981. His breakthrough came a few years later with the novella Touming de hong luobo (1986, published in French as Le radis de cristal 1993).
In his writing Mo Yan draws on his youthful experiences and on settings in the province of his birth. This is apparent in his novel Hong gaoliang jiazu (1987, in English Red Sorghum 1993). The book consists of five stories that unfold and interweave in Gaomi in several turbulent decades in the 20th century, with depictions of bandit culture, the Japanese occupation and the harsh conditions endured by poor farm workers. Red Sorghum was successfully filmed in 1987, directed by Zhang Yimou. The novel Tiantang suantai zhi ge (1988, in English The Garlic Ballads 1995) and his satirical Jiuguo (1992, in English The Republic of Wine 2000) have been judged subversive because of their sharp criticism of contemporary Chinese society.
Fengru feitun (1996, in English Big Breasts and Wide Hips 2004) is a broad historical fresco portraying 20th-century China through the microcosm of a single family. The novel Shengsi pilao (2006, in English Life and Death are Wearing Me Out 2008) uses black humour to describe everyday life and the violent transmogrifications in the young People's Republic, while Tanxiangxing (2004, to be published in English as Sandalwood Death 2013) is a story of human cruelty in the crumbling Empire. Mo Yan's latest novel Wa (2009, in French Grenouilles 2011) illuminates the consequences of China's imposition of a single-child policy.
Through a mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspectives, Mo Yan has created a world reminiscent in its complexity of those in the writings of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, at the same time finding a departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition. In addition to his novels, Mo Yan has published many short stories and essays on various topics, and despite his social criticism is seen in his homeland as one of the foremost contemporary authors.
The 9th MAODUN Literature Prize in 2011
Winner of Nobel Prize in Literature 2012 as "who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary". - Tomas Tranströmer was born on 15 April 1931 in Stockholm, Sweden. He was a writer, known for Östersjöar-En dikt av Tomas Tranströmer (2015), Flödande skog (2021) and Poesin sjunger (1976). He died on 26 March 2015 in Stockholm, Sweden.
- Writer
- Director
- Actor
Mario Vargas Llosa was born on 28 March 1936 in Arequipa, Peru. He is a writer and director, known for Pantaleon (1976), Captain Pantoja and the Special Services (1999) and Tune in Tomorrow... (1990). He has been married to Patricia Llosa since 1965. He was previously married to Julia Urquidi.- Herta Müller was born on 17 August 1953 in Nitzkydorf, Banat, Romania. She is a writer, known for Vulpe - vânator (1993), Traveling on One Leg (2016) and An den Rand geschrieben - Rumäniendeutsche Schriftsteller im Fadenkreuz der Securitate (2010). She is married to Harry Merkle. She was previously married to Richard Wagner.
- Writer
- Actor
Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio was born on 13 April 1940 in Nice, Alpes-Maritimes, France. He is a writer and actor, known for Yo (2015), Mondo (1995) and Moloch, les chairs vives (2005). He has been married to Jémia Jean since 10 December 1975. They have two children. He was previously married to Rosemarie Piquemal.- Doris Lessing was born on 22 October 1919 in Kermanshah, Persia [now Iran]. She was a writer, known for Adore (2013), Maupassant (1963) and Memoirs of a Survivor (1981). She was married to Gottfried Anton Nicolai Lessing and Frank Charles Wisdom. She died on 17 November 2013 in London, England, UK.
- Writer
- Actor
After school, Pamuk studied journalism and architecture at the Technical University of his hometown. After initially being interested in painting, he discovered his talent for writing in the mid-1970s. Pamuk soon presented his first novel, which won an award in 1979 and was published in 1982. Just a year later, his next novel was published under the title "Sessiz Ev" (1983), which received the "Prix de la découverte européenne" in its French translation in 1991. In 1985 Pamuk moved to New York to teach at Columbia University until 1988. In 1988 he returned to Istanbul. The novel "Beyaz Kale", published in Turkey in 1985, was awarded the "Independent Award for Foreign Fiction" in 1990. In the same year it was also published in German translation under the title "The White Fortress".
Pamuk celebrated his greatest success in Turkey in 1994 with the publication of the novel "Yeni Hayat", which was also published in German in 1998. For his next work, which was published in 1998 as a historical novel under the title "Benim Ad...", he was awarded the "IMPAC Dublin Award" in 2003. The liberal Turkish writer published his first political novel, "Kar", in 2002, whose German translation under the title "Schnee" received great attention in the German-speaking cultural circle in 2005. The work ironically addresses taboo topics in the recent history and present of Turkish society, especially the presence of Islamist tendencies and the murder of Armenians and Kurds. Through this openness, Pamuk provoked controversial reactions in Turkey, including demonstrations and death threats organized against him. Pamuk's work has already been translated into 34 languages and has a total circulation of more than one million copies.
In the Western world he is now considered the "Umberto Eco of Turkey". In 2005, Pamuk was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, which was presented to him in October 2005 in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt. At the same time, the writer was also honored with the Ricardo Huch Prize from the city of Darmstadt for his contribution to European international understanding. At the end of August 2005 it became known that the Turkish writer was threatened with a prison sentence of up to three years in his homeland for "publicly denigrating Turkishness": Pamuk had criticized the Turkish genocide against Armenians and Kurds in an interview with a Swiss newspaper, which is why he declared himself a prisoner He was due to stand trial in an Istanbul court at the end of 2005. The case against him was dropped in January 2006. In December 2006, the Turkish writer was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Orhan Pamuk is married and has a daughter.- Writer
- Actor
- Director
Harold Pinter, the 2005 Nobel Laureate for Literature, was born October 10, 1930, in London's working-class Hackney district to Hyman and Frances Pinter, Eastern European Jews who had immigrated to the United Kingdom from Portugal. Hyman (known as "Jack") was a tailor specializing in women's clothing and Frances was a homemaker. The Pinters, whose families hailed from Odessa and Poland in the Russian Empire, were part of a wave of Jewish emigration to the UK at the turn of the last century. It was a community that revered learning and culture. The Pinter family was close, and young Harold was traumatized when, at the outbreak of World War II, he was evacuated from London to Cornwall with other London children for a year to avoid becoming casualties of German aerial bombing.
Pinter has said that his encounter with anti-Semitism while growing up was the fuse that ignited the organic process leading him to becoming a playwright. As the Nobel Prize citation attests, Pinter developed into the greatest English dramatist of the post-World War II era. The young Pinter studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and the Central School of Speech and Drama. In 1950 he published several poems and began working as a professional actor. Under the stage name David Baron, he toured the Republic of Ireland with Anew McMaster's Shakespearean repertory company in 1951-52. Significantly for Pinter's future, 1951 not only marked the debut of his career as a professional actor but also marked the first performance of future Nobel Literature Laureate Samuel Beckett's absurdist masterpiece "Waiting for Godot." He next appeared with Sir Donald Wolfit's theatrical company at the King's Theatre, Hammersmith, for the 1953- 54 season before becoming a player with various provincial repertory companies, including the Birmingham Rep, until he gave himself over full-time to playwriting in 1959.
Two significant events that would change Great Britain forever occurred during his apprenticeship in provincial rep: (1) the Suez Crisis of 1955 that shattered the UK's pretensions to empire in a post-colonial world and doomed the imperial generations represented by Prime Minister Anthony Eden and his mentor Winston Churchill, and (2) the 1956 premiere of John Osborne's play "Look Back in Anger." The shattering of the United Kingdom's complacency over imperialism meant that many successful people of Pinter's generation, who normally would have become Tories upon achieving some modicum of success, were disillusioned and drifted towards Labour and the left. No longer would a working- class person, if he so chose, have to be ashamed or stymied if \eschewing becoming middle-class or bourgeois. Osborne's play was the seminal work of the "kitchen-sink" school of drama that would dominate English theater for a decade, in which working-class life and struggles were dramatized. The hegemony of this school of theater was such that for the first time, a working-class or provincial accent became something treasured, something to be proud of, as the former world was set firmly upon its head. Even the great Laurence Olivier turned his back on the commercial theater to assay Osbourne's Archie Rice, a down-at-the-heels music hall performer, in "The Entertainer" (1957).
The kitchen-sink drama was a movement that Pinter would not be a part of, though it did open the doors for working-class writers who, unlike the working class-born Noël Coward, had no interest in becoming bourgeois. The other major element in the cultural milieu that forged Pinter was the Cold War, the absurdity of facing doomsday everyday under the threat of The Bomb (the USSR had acquired the means to produce a bomb through its atomic spy ring and exploded its first A-bomb in 1949, thus ending the US monopoly on nuclear weapons and making the Korean war, the suppression of an East Berlin uprising and the squashing of the Hungarian Revolution practical, if not possible). The Cold War gave legitimacy to the rise of the police state, not in totalitarian countries but in the use of police-state tactics in the western industrial democracies. To quote American poet' Charles Bukowski', this was an era marked by "War All The Time," not between two superpower behemoths but in everyday human relations, poisoned as they were by the Cold War climate of absurdity, paranoia and imminent holocaust.
In 1953 the accused "atomic spies" Julius Rosenberg and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in the United States when President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the man who had overseen the liberation of Europe as Supreme Allied Commander fighting the Nazi totalitarian menace, had refused clemency for even Ethel, the mother of two small boys. It was a domestic drama -- a woman's loyalty to her husband, her loss of not only her life but the Issac-like evocative sacrifice of any normal life for her two children when Eisenhower-Jehovah refused to stay the executioner's hand -- that had combined with the felicities of affairs of state and world power politics. The question of whether they were guilty or innocent--not proven beyond a doubt in 1951, when they had been convicted in a trial that was compared by many to the Stalinist show-trials that had occurred in the Soviet Union and still occurred in the satellite countries of the Warsaw Pact after World War II - gave rise to an overwhelming fundamental question: What is real? Reality, as Hannah Arendt had put it in "The Human Condition," is socially defined; that is a given. But how about when that reality no longer makes sense, when the individual cannot partake of the consensus demanded of him in the 1950s, whether conservative, middle-class, haute bourgeoisie or radical left as dictated by some flaming Red party boss - a person struggling with his own life? How does he answer the question: What is real? It is a question that Pinter took upon himself to answer, and answered by showing us there is no answer. In this quest, a genius arrived on the world stage in the form of a player who decided to craft his own words, for himself and his post-Holocaust, pre-Holocaust audience. When life stops making sense, as it did in the 1940s when the global war against fascism left 50 million dead and the modern industrial state was tasked with the exigencies of mass- murder, and as it did in the 1950s when, under the aegis of combating another totalitarian system a domestic fascism in kind if not degree arose in the Anglo-Saxon countries with their great gravital pull towards conformity within a shell of consumerism, it still behooves a human being to try to understand the human condition.
In 1957 Bristol University staged Pinter's first play "The Room." He had told a friend who worked in Bristol University's drama department an idea he had for a play. The friend was so enamored of the idea that he commissioned the work, with the proviso that a script be ready within a week. Though he didn't believe he could meet his friend's demands, Pinter wrote the one-act play in four days. "The Room" had all the hallmarks of what would become known as "Pinteresque," in that it had a mundane situation that gradually filled with menace and mystery through the author's deliberate omission of an explanation or motivation for the action on stage. It is ironic perhaps that an actor would rid his script of motivation as "motivation" is the Holy Grail of inwardly-directed actors such as those tutored in "The Method" in America, but it was emblematic of the times that stated motivations frequently masked other, starker, more id-like drives in people or in nation-states that were beyond human comprehension in terms of being rational. Modern society had become irrational, and motivations post-Freud could be understood as a manifestation of Thanatos, the Death Instinct. Imminent violence and power plays would become other leitmotifs of Pinter's oeuvre.
Pinter wrote a second one-act play in 1957, "The Dumb Waiter," an absurdist drama concerning two hit men employed by a secret organization to kill an unknown victim. It was with this play that Pinter added an element of black comedy, mostly through his brilliant use of dialog, which not only elucidated the killers' growing anxiety but underscored the very absurdity of their situation. The play would not be performed until 1960, after the staging of his first two full-length plays, one a flop, and one a hit. His first full-length play, "The Birthday Party," debuted at the Arts Theatre in Cambridge in 1958. In the play the apathetic Stanley, the denizen of a dilapidated boarding house, is visited by two men. The audience never learns their motivation, but knows that Stanley is terrified of them. They organize a birthday party for Stanley, who insists that it is not his birthday. Pinter is following in the footsteps of the great absurdist Samuel Beckett in that he steadfastly refuses to give clear motivations to his characters, or rational explanations for the sake of his audience (Pinter and Beckett became friends). The play, now considered a masterpiece, flopped on its initial London run after being savaged by critics. It was revived after Pinter's second full-length play, 1960's "The Caretaker," established him as a major force in the English-language theater.
His early plays were rooted in the absurdism that became the major theatrical paradigm on the European stage in the third quarter of the 20th century, after the horrors of the war and the Holocaust. The early plays that made his reputation such as "The Homecoming" (1964) and his middle-period work such as "No Man's Land" (1976) have been called "comedies of menace." Typically, they use what at first seems like an innocent situation and develop it into an absurd and threatening environment through actions that usually are inexplicable to the audience and sometimes even to the other characters in the play. A Pinter drama is dark and claustrophobic. His language is full of menacing pauses. The lives of Pinter's characters usually are revealed to be stunted by guilt and horror. The duality and absurdity of Pinter's theatrical world-view gave rise to the adjective "Pinteresque," which took its place next to "Kafkaesque," a product of the horrors of the first quarter of the century (Pinter would write the screenplay for an adaption of Franz Kafka's "The Trial".)
Beginning in the 1960s, Pinter further enhanced his reputation as a writer with his screenplays, particular his work with Joseph Losey in The Servant (1963) and Accident (1967) (Losey planned an adaptation of Marcel Proust's "Le Temps Retrouve" and commissioned Pinter to write the screenplay. The film was never made by Losey, but Pinter's screenplay was subsequently published to great acclaim). His later screenplays, including his last produced work with Losey, The Go-Between (1971), are, ironically, noted for their clarity. He was twice nominated for the Academy Award as a screenwriter, for his adaptation of John Fowles' labyrinthine novel into the film The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981) and for Betrayal (1983), his adaptation of his own play. Such was the respect that Pinter was held that Elia Kazan, one of the great film directors, complained in his autobiography "A Life" (1988) that The Last Tycoon (1976) producer Sam Spiegel had such reverence for Pinter that he would not let Kazan change his script.
After the great plays of his early and mid-period, Pinter became more overtly political. His later plays, which generally are shorter than the plays from the period in which he made his reputation, typically address political subjects and often are allegories on oppression. In the late 1970s Pinter became more outspoken on political issues and is decidedly of the left. He is passionately committed to human rights and is not shy about bringing examples of oppression from client states sponsored by the Anglo-Saxon democracies to the public's attention. In 2002 Pinter experienced what he described as a "personal nightmare" when he had to undergo chemotherapy to treat a case of cancer of the esophagus. The ordeal, which has been ongoing for three years, triggered a personal metamorphosis in the man. "I've been through the valley of the shadow of death," Pinter explained about his quickening. "While in many respects I have certain characteristics that I had, I'm also a very changed man."
In early 2005 Pinter declared in a radio interview that he was retiring as a dramatist in favor of writing poetry: "I think I've stopped writing plays now, but I haven't stopped writing poems. I've written 29 plays. Isn't that enough?" Pinter has become an outspoken critic of war. He was a bitter critic of the US-led intervention against Slobodan Milosevic's Serbia during President Bill Clinton's administration and an even harsher critic of the US-led war in Iraq. The fiercely anti- war Pinter has accused President George W. Bush of being a "mass-murderer" and has called British Prime Minister Tony Blair a "deluded idiot" for supporting US foreign policy. Pinter claimed immediately after the 9/11 attacks on New York City and the Pentagon that they were a requited revenge for the destruction wrought on Afghanistan and Iraq by US imperialism and its anti-Taliban policies and sanctions on Iraq. He has publicly denounced the retaliatory U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and the unprovoked 2003 invasion of Iraq. Pinter likens the Bush administration and Bush's America to Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, claiming the US is bent on world hegemony. Controversially, he has declared that the only difference between Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union is that the US is more hypocritical and has better public relations.
One cannot fault Pinter, in the political ring, for being inconsistent or for jumping on a bandwagon. The man, as well as the artist, is a person that sticks to his convictions. The award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Pinter just after he celebrated his 75th birthday was completely unexpected by pundits handicapping the award. Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk and Syrian poet Adonis were considered the front-runners, as European writers recently had dominated the award (Pinter's Nobel Prize makes it nine out of ten times in the past ten years that a European writer has won, and the second time in the past five years an English writer has banged the gong), and it was felt the Academy would recognize a writer from another continent, particularly one from Asia Minor. Thus, the award can be seen as a not-so-veiled criticism of the United States in general and President George W. Bush in particular by the Swedish Academy. Because of Pinter's renouncing of the form of which he was a master and his anointment of himself as a poet, in light of his volume of poetry, "War" (2003) that denounces the Iraq War frequently in vulgar, raw and unrythmic poetry that poses no threat to William Butler Yeats or W.H. Auden or Robert Frost or Stevens, one must consider that the Swedish Academy was giving the world's highest prize for literature at least in part to a poet whose latest work was fiercely anti-American and anti-imperialist.
Despite being highly controversial, Pinter -- who was appointed a Commander of the British Empire in 1966 (one step down from a knighthood, an honor he subsequently turned down) -- was named a Companion of Honour in 2002, an honor that does not carry a title. In addition to writing poetry, acting and directing in the theater, Pinter serves as the chairman of the Gaieties Cricket Club, an affiliate of he Club Cricket Conference. He also is active in the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, an organization that supports Fidel Castro, who remains the #1 bugaboo of the United States after Islamic terrorists, just slightly ahead of fellow hemispheric boogeyman Hugo Chávez, a recent arriviste on the world stage. He also is a member of the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic, an organization that appeals for the freedom of Slobodan Milosevic on the grounds that NATO's war against Milosevic's Yugoslavia was unjustified under international law.- Writer
- Actress
Her mother Olga, née Buchner, came from the Viennese upper middle class. Her father Friedrich Jelinek was a chemist and of Jewish-Czech descent. Jelinek spent her childhood and youth in Vienna. There she initially attended a monastery school. She then began studying theater studies and art history at the University of Vienna until she was forced to stop studying in 1967 due to anxiety and lived at home in complete isolation for a year. Meanwhile, she began her life as a professional writer. The first novel "bukolit" (1968) remained unpublished until 1979. In the 1960s, Jelinek experimented with texts, approaching the "Vienna Group" in her stylistic expression. In 1970 she wrote the first German-language pop novel with the title "we are decoys baby!", which she assembled from ordinary set pieces.
After that, her works, which included novels as well as radio plays and theater works, became more socially critical. She also completed organ and piano training at the conservatory, which she completed with the organist examination in 1971. In 1972 she married Gottfried Hüngsberg. Her literary breakthrough came in 1975 with the novel "The Lovers", the Marxist-feminist caricature of a local novel. Her main topics now included women in a male-dominated society and the sexual oppression of women. In presenting her themes, Jelinek uses a special language technique: she uses different types of text, such as from advertising or Schubert songs, or she uses stereotypical formulations in an ironic way to reveal their true meanings.
The novel "The Piano Player" was published in 1983. The biographical interpretation predominated in the reviews; the discussion of the text faded into the background. In general, the author uses language in the literal sense in many of her pieces in order to question social ways of thinking. This is represented by novel titles such as "The Lovers" (1975), "The Piano Player" (1983), "Lust" (1989) as well as the plays "What happened after Nora left her husband" (among others 1979), "Clara S. " (including 1982) or "Illness or Modern Women" (premiered in 1987).
Jelinek packaged the diversity of her literary themes in the major novel "The Children of the Dead" (1995), in which she addresses motifs such as home, mother-daughter relationships, life and death. The play "Sportstück", which premiered in 1998, is also about death. As a Marxist-oriented author, according to her critics, she tried, in the tradition of Berthold Brecht, to further develop the enlightenment function of art using modern literary means. Jelinek became an award-winning writer. Her prizes and awards include, among others, the Austrian State Scholarship for Literature (1972), the Script Prize of the Ministry of the Interior of the Federal Republic of Germany (1979), the Heinrich Böll Prize of the City of Cologne (1986), the Literature Prize of the State of Styria (1987) and Germany highest literary award: the Georg Büchner Prize (1998). The novel "Greed. An Entertainment Novel" was published in 2000.
In 2004, Elfriede Jelinek received the Nobel Prize in Literature for "the musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and dramas that, with unique linguistic passion, reveal the absurdity and compelling power of social clichés." On November 28, 2008, her play "Rechnitz" (The Strangling Angel) premiered at the Munich Kammerspiele under the direction of Jossi Wieler. In 2012, the premiere of the work "The Street. The City. The Übefall", directed by Johan Simons, followed at this location. In 2018, her play "Am Königsweg" was named "Play of the Year" by the magazine "Theater aktuell".
Elfriede Jelinek lives in Vienna, Munich and Paris.- J.M. Coetzee was born on 9 February 1940 in Cape Town, South Africa. He is a writer, known for Waiting for the Barbarians (2019), Dust (1985) and Disgrace (2008).
- Imre Kertész was born on 9 November 1929 in Budapest, Hungary. He was a writer, known for Fateless (2005), Emelet (2006) and Csacsifogat (1984). He was married to Magda Ambrus-Sass and Albina Vas. He died on 31 March 2016 in Budapest, Hungary.
- V.S. Naipaul was born on 17 August 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad, Trinidad and Tobago. He was a writer, known for The Mystic Masseur (2001), The Levin Interviews (1980) and Bookmark (1983). He was married to Nadira Khannum Alvi and Patricia Ann Hale. He died on 11 August 2018 in London, England, UK.
- He grew up as the son of a merchant family. At the age of 15 he reported for military service in the Second World War. In 1944 he became a member of the Waffen-SS and was stationed in the 10th SS Panzer Division Frundsberg. After the end of the war he was taken prisoner by the Americans until 1946. Grass then began an apprenticeship as a stonemason. In 1948 he began studying graphics and sculpture at the art academy in Düsseldorf. After completing his studies, he became a visual arts student with the sculptor Karl Hartung in Berlin in 1953. The first exhibitions of his sculptures and graphics followed. In 1954 he married Anna Schwarz. Grass first became active as a writer in 1957. Now he mainly wrote short prose, poems and plays that were poetic and absurd in character. In 1958, Grass received the "Group 47" sponsorship award for his manuscript "The Tin Drum."
Further novels such as "Cat and Mouse" and "Dog Years" were published. His excessive and provocative expression was always evident here, which earned him the reputation of a political moralist. The book "Letters across the border" was published in 1968. Here Grass commented on the topic of the Prague Spring. Further works such as "The Plebeians rehearse the uprising", "Before" and "locally anesthetized" were created. In the course of the student movement, his participation in public protests against the emergency laws increased. In 1972 the story "From the Diary of a Snail" was published. In it, Grass described the 1969 federal election campaign. The epic novel "The Butt" was published in 1977. In 1978 he divorced his wife Anna. In 1979 he married Ute Grunert for the second time. The film adaptation of "The Tin Drum" was also released in 1979 and was directed by Volker Schlöndorff. Mario Adorf, Katharina Thalbach, Otto Sander and Charles Aznavour, among others, played in the film adaptation. In 1980, "The Tin Drum" was awarded an Oscar for "Best Foreign Language Film," making it the first German film to receive this award.
From 1982 to 1993 Grass was a member of the SPD. Through his political activities, his literary work became increasingly popular with the public. In 1983, Grass and other writers, artists and scientists signed the "Heilbronn Manifesto", which called for people to refuse military service because of the stationing of the Pershing-2 rockets. Three years later, in 1986, the book "Die Rattin" was published, which was also made into a film a few years later. In 1987, Grass re-entered political life and took part in the SPD campaign for the state elections in Schleswig-Holstein. The Academy of Arts refused to hold a solidarity event for Salman Rushdie in 1989. Grass resigned from the association for this reason. Grass took the time of German reunification as an opportunity to speak out against "sudden unity based on mere annex Article 23 of the Basic Law". Grass campaigned for a cultural nation growing together. His novel "Prophecies of Doom," published in 1992, also described reconciliation between East and West. A year later, Grass resigned from the SPD because of the change in asylum law supported by social democratic votes. In other novels, such as "A Wide Field" (1995), he repeatedly brought up the problem of German history between the building of the wall and reunification.
In 1997, Grass, together with the SPD, Alliance 90/GREENS and the PDS, called on Helmut Kohl's government to resign. This year, with Egon Bahr, he also founded the "Willy Brandt Circle" for people "who have retained their independence of thought" (quote from Bahr). When the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Turk Yasar Kemal, Grass criticized Kurdish policy. He once again turned against the change in asylum law in the Federal Republic. In 1998, Grass began campaigning for the SPD in the new federal states. In the work "My Century", which he completed in 1999, Grass tells a separate story for each year of this century. On December 10, 1999, Grass was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for his life's work. For his services to German-Polish understanding, Grass was awarded the "Gloria Artis" medal in September 2001.
Grass received the Danish Hans Christian Andersen Prize in April 2005. In the same month he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Free University of Berlin. In the run-up to the early federal elections in September 2005, Grass drew attention to himself through his public support of the SPD ruling party, for which he was also able to win over other fellow writers. In the same year, 2005, he founded the authors' circle "Lübeck Literaturtreffen". In 2006, Grass was awarded the "Brücke Prize". In August of the same year he vacated his membership for the first time ft in the Waffen-SS. In previous information he was an anti-aircraft assistant for the Wehrmacht between 1944 and 1945. Günther Grass' clarification was accompanied by great media interest. With the documentary "The Uncomfortable" snapshots of the controversial Nobel Prize winner were released in German cinemas in April 2007.
Günter Grass died on April 13, 2015 in Lübeck. - Writer
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José Saramago was born on 16 November 1922 in Azinhaga, Golega, Portugal. He was a writer, known for Enemy (2013), Blindness (2008) and O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo. He was married to Pilar del Río and Ilda Reis. He died on 18 June 2010 in Lanzarote, Las Palmas, Canary Islands, Spain.- Writer
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Dario Fo was born on 24 March 1926 in Sangiano, Lombardy, Italy. He was a writer and actor, known for It Happened in Rome (1957), Lo svitato (1956) and The Betrothed (1989). He was married to Franca Rame. He died on 13 October 2016 in Milan, Italy.- Wislawa Szymborska was born on 2 July 1923 in Prowent, Poznanskie [now part of Kórnik, Wielkopolskie], Poland. She was a writer, known for Teatr Polskiego Radia (2004), Tortures (2017) and Vietnam (2021). She was married to Adam Wlodek. She died on 1 February 2012 in Kraków, Malopolskie, Poland.
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Seamus Heaney was born on 13 April 1939 in Castledawson, Londonderry, Northern Ireland, UK. He was a writer and actor, known for Stay (2013), Bye-Child (2003) and Seanchaí (2006). He was married to Marie Devlin. He died on 30 August 2013 in Dublin, Ireland.- Writer
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Kenzaburô Ôe was born on 31 January 1935 in Oose, Japan. He was a writer, known for Upland, A False Student (1960) and Warera no jidai (1959). He was married to Yukari itami. He died on 3 March 2023 in Japan.- Writer
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Toni Morrison was born on 18 February 1931 in Lorain, Ohio, USA. She was a writer and actress, known for Song of Solomon, Beloved (1998) and American Experience (1987). She was married to Harold Morrison. She died on 5 August 2019 in Bronx, New York City, New York, USA.