John Baker’s Blog

I had read several reports of Doris Lessing’s acceptance speech for the Nobel prize in Literature, but only found the full text by accident. Strange how we fall into these traps. I know the media will rarely give me the whole story, and what I read will be a garbled report missing the essence of [...]

The Nobel Prize in Literature has only been shared on two or three occasions in its history, and the first of these was in 1904 when it was divided equally between
FRÉDÉRIC MISTRAL in recognition of the fresh originality and true inspiration of his poetic production, which faithfully reflects the [...]

Early in his career Henrik Ibsen prophesied: One of these days, the younger generation will come knocking at my door. And they certainly did. They wanted to see and hear the man who had revolutionised drama during the second half of the nineteenth century.
The Nobel committee, however, didn’t come knocking at all. Instead, they gave [...]

When the Swedish Academy met in 1902 to decide who was to take the second Nobel Prize in Literature, there were, basically, two names on the short-list. Some members, of course, were keen to award the prize to Leo Tolstoy, but a majority in the Academy could not bring themselves to accept the Russian’s radical [...]