Nobel Prize in Literature 2011

The 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer. Mr. Tranströmer is the first poet to win this most prestigious of prizes since Poland’s Wislawa Szymborska in 1996.

Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, praised Tranströmer’s “exquisite” language and said, ”he is writing about the big questions – death, history, memory, nature. Human beings are sort of the prism where all these great entities meet and it makes us important. You can never feel small after reading the poetry of Tomas Tranströmer.”

Here is one poem. You can also listen to it being read by Chris Moran in a Guardian podcast here.

 Alone

                 I

One evening in February I came near to dying here.
The car skidded sideways on the ice, out
on the wrong side of the road. The approaching cars –
their lights – closed in.

My name, my girls, my job
broke free and were left silently behind
further and further away. I was anonymous
like a boy in a playground surrounded by enemies.

The approaching traffic had huge lights.
They shone on me while I pulled at the wheel
in a transparent terror that floated like egg white.
The seconds grew – there was space in them –
they grew as big as hospital buildings.

You could almost pause
and breathe out for a while
before being crushed.

Then something caught: a helping grain of sand
or a wonderful gust of wind. The car broke free
and scuttled smartly right over the road.
A post shot up and cracked – a sharp clang – it
flew away in the darkness.

Then – stillness. I sat back in my seat-belt
and saw someone coming through the whirling snow
to see what had become of me.

    II

I have been walking for a long time
on the frozen Östergötland fields.
I have not seen a single person.

In other parts of the world
there are people who are born, live and die
in a perpetual crowd.

To be always visible – to live
in a swarm of eyes –
a special expression must develop.
Face coated with clay.

The murmuring rises and falls
while they divide up among themselves
the sky, the shadows, the sand grains.

I must be alone
ten minutes in the morning
and ten minutes in the evening.
– Without a programme.

Everyone is queuing at everyone’s door.

Many.

One.

Translated from the Swedish by Robin Fulton who said,  “Some poets use their own language so densely they won’t translate at all. Tranströmer is not one of these. In many ways the language he uses is relatively unadventurous and simple [but] he gives people unusual images [which are] sometimes very surprising and give the reader a shock. That should be what poets do.”

Tomas Tranströmer suffered a stroke over 20 years ago which left his ability to speak severely affected. At a recent appearance in London, his words were read by others, while Tranströmer contributed by playing pieces specially composed for him to play on the piano with only his left hand.

Mario Vargas Llosa: Five essential novels

Wondering where to start with the new Nobel laureate? Here are five highlights from The Guardian

The Time of the Hero (1963)

Vargas Llosa’s first novel, published in Spanish as La Cuidad y Los Perros (The City and the Dogs), is set in a military academy in Peru, the Leoncio Prado Academy, which the author himself attended. When published, it caused such a stir that the academy’s authorities burned 1,000 copies of the book in protest. The novel explores army codes and strict military hierachy, telling of a group of young cadets struggling to survive in a bullying and violent environment, a situation eventually leading to the murder of one of their number. The book was later filmed by Peruvian director Francisco Lombardi.

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977)

This comic novel set in 1950s Lima tells of a student and aspiring writer – Marito – who falls in love with his uncle’s sister-in-law, 13 years his senior. Marito also befriends a manic Bolivian scriptwriter, who’s producing soap operas daily for a local radio station. The plot is loosely based on the story of Vargas Llosa’s own first marriage, at the age of 19, to the then 32-year-old Julia Urquidi, who was indeed his aunt by marriage. Urquidi later gave a rather different account of her relationship with Vargas Llosa in a memoir, Lo que Varguitas no dijo (What Little Vargas Didn’t Say).

The War of the End of the World (1981)

Hailed as a tragic masterpiece, the novel was inspired by true events in Baha, Brazil, in the late 19th century. At a time of economic decline following the breakdown of the Empire of Brazil, the poor are drawn to a charismatic preacher, Antonio Conselheiro, who is predicting the end of the world. Condemned by the church, Conselheiro takes his rag-tag band of followers to build a town at Canudos, set to be a new utopia. But Canudos exists in defiance of the national government, and violent conflict ensues when armies are sent to bring the prophet to order.

The Feast of the Goat (2000)

A savage portrait of political tyranny through the story of dictator Rafael Trujillo, “the Goat”, whose bloody rule of the Dominican Republic lasted from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. The novel follows the ageing Generalissimo through his last day on earth as his assassins circle, showing him as a grotesque character whose failing body is no bar to his preening machismo. A contrasting narrative strand explores the human impact of Trujillo’s evil regime through the story of a woman betrayed in childhood by her father to the dictator’s sexual depravity. The damage done by dictatorship is seen to continue after his death, as the effects of the old regime persist. The novel was praised for its vividness but criticised by some as heavy-handed.

The Bad Girl (2006)

Vargas Llosa’s most recent novel features Ricardo Slim Somorcio, who, as a teenager in Peru in the 1950s, first meets a poor immigrant girl, Lily, and falls in love. But Lily suddenly disappears. Throughout the subsequent four decades, during which Ricardo works as a translator in various locations in South America and Europe, he keeps re-encountering “the bad girl”, who has her eyes set firmly on the pursuit of money and power. Ricardo remains obsessed with her. At each meeting though Lily appears in a radically different disguise, chameleon-like, professing not to know him.

Nobel Prize in Literature Winner 2010

The winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature is Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat”.

Mario Vargas Llosa was born on March 28, 1936 in Arequipa, Peru to Ernesto Vargas Maldonado and Dora Llosa Ureta. After his parents divorced, he grew up with his mother and grandfather in the city of Cochabamba in Bolivia. The family moved to Piura, Peru in 1946 where his grandfather held an appointment as a civil servant. His parents were reunited in 1947 and settled in Lima. Mario Vargas Llosa went to a Catholic school in Lima. Later his father sent him to the military school, Leoncio Prado. After graduating from Colegio Nacional San Miguel in Piura, Mario Vargas Llosa studied law and literature in Lima and Madrid. In 1955, he married Julia Urquidi. In 1959, he moved to Paris where he worked as a language teacher and as a journalist for Agence-France-Presse and the national television service of France. As an author, he had an international breakthrough with the novel La ciudad y los perros (1963; The Time of the Hero, 1966). This novel, which builds on experiences from Leoncio Prado, was considered controversial in his home land. A thousand copies were burnt publicly by officers from Leoncio Prado. In 1964 Mario Vargas Llosa divorced Julia Urquidi. The following year, he married his cousin, Patricia Llosa. After having lived alternately in Paris, Lima, London and Barcelona, he returned to Lima in 1974. In 1975 he was elected to the Peruvian Academy. He has lectured and taught at a number of universities in the USA, South America and Europe. In 1990 he ran for the Presidency representing the FREDEMO alliance in Peru, but lost the election. In 1994 he was elected to the Spanish Academy, where he took his seat in 1996. In recent years he has lived in Barcelona, Madrid, Lima, Paris and London. His well known works include Conversación en la catedral (1969; Conversation in the Cathedral, 1975), La guerra del fin del mundo (1981; The War of the End of the World, 1984) and La fiesta del chivo (2000; The Feast of the Goat, 2001). He is also a noted journalist and essayist. (Source : Nobelprize.org)

After the announcement of Mario Vargas Llosa’s award, Peter Englund, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, told senior editor Simon Frantz that Mario Vargas Llosa is “one of the great Latin American storytellers – a master of dialogue who has been searching for the elusive concept known as the total novel, and who believes in the power of fiction to improve the world”.

You can see Mario Vargas Llosa’s full bibliography here. And click here for a Guardian article.

Here’s the Guardian’s Five Essential Novels