In his preface Ottar Draugswold remarks that his goal in compiling this anthology is to pique readers’ interest in previously unread authors. He has done this by selecting 31 of the 95 recipients of the Nobel Prize for Literature since 190l and introducing them. When a Nobel Prize winner goes to Stockholm to receive the award he or she is given 45 minutes for an acceptance address, and they can use the time as they think fit. Most of them choose a speech or lecture format. So, after introducing his selections, Draugswold reprints the addresses made by the award winners. Sometimes these are in full, sometimes excerpts only are offered.
Although he complains that the Nobel Committee has a eurocentric bias, the editor himself has chosen numerous non‐European writers for inclusion. Examples of these are Sinclair Lewis, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Pearl S. Buck, Saul Bellow, Nadine Gordimer, Toni Morrison and others. Among the Europeans he includes W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, François Mauriac, Par Lagerkvist, Albert Camus, Mikhail Sholokhov and William Golding. All selections are open to criticism, and these are no exception. As an Englishman, I would not have expected Rudyard Kipling and Winston Churchill to have been ignored, and it would have been appropriate if the editor had included Patrick White, the sole Australian award winner so far. However, that is by the way.
As one would expect from an anthology, the topics chosen by the Nobel Prize winners are many and varied. Sinclair Lewis spoke about US literature in an address which included a defence of Theodore Dreiser; Yeats’ theme was the Irish dramatic movement; Pearl Buck talked about the Chinese novel; Bertrand Russell’s theme was understandably philosophical; others, such as Naguib Mahfouz, who won the prize in 1988, and Kenzaburo Oe, the Japanese writer who won it in 1994, were autobiographical in their approaches.
So here we have a variety of themes, although nearly all the winners say something about writing, which gives credence to the title of Draugswold’s book. The volume is augmented by an appendix listing all the Nobel laureates in literature from 1901 to 1999, and there are very useful bibliographies of their writings. All in all, this is a book which will interest litterateurs world‐wide.
