1987 Nobel Prize in Literature

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1987 Nobel Prize in Literature

Joseph Brodsky

"for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity."

Date

22 October 1987 (1987-10-22) (announcement)
10 December 1987
(ceremony)

Location

Stockholm, Sweden

Presented by

Swedish Academy

First award

1901

Website

Official website

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Nobel Prize in Literature

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The 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the Russian–American poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996) "for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity."^[1]^[2]^[3]

Laureate

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At the age of 18, Joseph Brodsky started writing poetry. His poetry was influenced by British poets like John Donne and W. H. Auden as well as Russian predecessors like Alexander Pushkin and Boris Pasternak. Brodsky's forced exile affected his writing, both thematically and linguistically. He details how he gradually loses hair, teeth, consonants, and verbs in Chast' rechi ("A Part of Speech", 1977). The interaction between the poet and society appears frequently in his poems. According to Brodsky, literature and language are vital tools for the advancement of society and the advancement of human thought. His famous literary and autobiographical essay collection Less Than One: Selected Essays (1986) explores his fellow Russian writers like Dostoyevsky, Mandelstam, and Platonov.^[4]^[5]

Award ceremony speech

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At the award ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December 1987, Sture Allén, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said:

In the remarkable writings to which the Swedish Academy has drawn attention this year, poetry as the highest manifestation of life is a theme throughout. It is developed with a poetic brilliance combined with both intellectual beauty and linguistic mastery. (...) Style and mood alternate in this richly orchestrated poetry. Here is the profound cultural analysis in the essays side by side with the rollicking ironies in the poem History of the Twentieth Century. Yet, for Joseph Brodsky poetry, even in its mirthful moments, is deadly earnest.^[6]

References

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^ The Nobel Prize in Literature 1987 nobelprize.org
^ Howell Raines (23 October 1987). "Exiled Soviet Poet Wins Nobel Prize in Literature". The New York Times. Retrieved 21 May 2021.
^ Seamus Heaney (8 November 1987). "Brodsky's Nobel: What the Applause Was About". The New York Times. Retrieved 21 May 2021.
^ Joseph Brodsky britannica.com
^ Joseph Brodsky – Facts nobelprize.org
^ "Award ceremony speech". nobelprize.org.

External links

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1987 Press release nobelprize.org
Award ceremony speech nobelprize.org
Nobel lecture nobelprize.org
Nobel diploma nobelprize.org

v t e Laureates of the Nobel Prize in Literature
1901–1920	1901: Sully Prudhomme 1902: Theodor Mommsen 1903: Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson 1904: Frédéric Mistral / José Echegaray 1905: Henryk Sienkiewicz 1906: Giosuè Carducci 1907: Rudyard Kipling 1908: Rudolf Eucken 1909: Selma Lagerlöf 1910: Paul Heyse 1911: Maurice Maeterlinck 1912: Gerhart Hauptmann 1913: Rabindranath Tagore 1914 1915: Romain Rolland 1916: Verner von Heidenstam 1917: Karl Gjellerup / Henrik Pontoppidan 1918 1919: Carl Spitteler 1920: Knut Hamsun
1921–1940	1921: Anatole France 1922: Jacinto Benavente 1923: W. B. Yeats 1924: Władysław Reymont 1925: George Bernard Shaw 1926: Grazia Deledda 1927: Henri Bergson 1928: Sigrid Undset 1929: Thomas Mann 1930: Sinclair Lewis 1931: Erik Axel Karlfeldt (posthumously) 1932: John Galsworthy 1933: Ivan Bunin 1934: Luigi Pirandello 1935 1936: Eugene O'Neill 1937: Roger Martin du Gard 1938: Pearl S. Buck 1939: Frans Eemil Sillanpää 1940
1941–1960	1941 1942 1943 1944: Johannes V. Jensen 1945: Gabriela Mistral 1946: Hermann Hesse 1947: André Gide 1948: T. S. Eliot 1949: William Faulkner 1950: Bertrand Russell 1951: Pär Lagerkvist 1952: François Mauriac 1953: Winston Churchill 1954: Ernest Hemingway 1955: Halldór Laxness 1956: Juan Ramón Jiménez 1957: Albert Camus 1958: Boris Pasternak 1959: Salvatore Quasimodo 1960: Saint-John Perse
1961–1980	1961: Ivo Andrić 1962: John Steinbeck 1963: Giorgos Seferis 1964: Jean-Paul Sartre (declined award) 1965: Mikhail Sholokhov 1966: Shmuel Yosef Agnon / Nelly Sachs 1967: Miguel Ángel Asturias 1968: Yasunari Kawabata 1969: Samuel Beckett 1970: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 1971: Pablo Neruda 1972: Heinrich Böll 1973: Patrick White 1974: Eyvind Johnson / Harry Martinson 1975: Eugenio Montale 1976: Saul Bellow 1977: Vicente Aleixandre 1978: Isaac Bashevis Singer 1979: Odysseas Elytis 1980: Czesław Miłosz
1981–2000	1981: Elias Canetti 1982: Gabriel García Márquez 1983: William Golding 1984: Jaroslav Seifert 1985: Claude Simon 1986: Wole Soyinka 1987: Joseph Brodsky 1988: Naguib Mahfouz 1989: Camilo José Cela 1990: Octavio Paz 1991: Nadine Gordimer 1992: Derek Walcott 1993: Toni Morrison 1994: Kenzaburō Ōe 1995: Seamus Heaney 1996: Wisława Szymborska 1997: Dario Fo 1998: José Saramago 1999: Günter Grass 2000: Gao Xingjian
2001–2020	2001: V. S. Naipaul 2002: Imre Kertész 2003: J. M. Coetzee 2004: Elfriede Jelinek 2005: Harold Pinter 2006: Orhan Pamuk 2007: Doris Lessing 2008: J. M. G. Le Clézio 2009: Herta Müller 2010: Mario Vargas Llosa 2011: Tomas Tranströmer 2012: Mo Yan 2013: Alice Munro 2014: Patrick Modiano 2015: Svetlana Alexievich 2016: Bob Dylan 2017: Kazuo Ishiguro 2018: Olga Tokarczuk 2019: Peter Handke 2020: Louise Glück
2021–present	2021: Abdulrazak Gurnah 2022: Annie Ernaux 2023: Jon Fosse 2024: Han Kang 2025: to be determined

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