DIY Department: How to collect a Nobel Prize in Literature

“All writers belong to the class of non-orators,” Thomas Mann warned his audience at the outset, accepting the Nobel prize for literature in 1929 in a self-described state of “festive intoxication”. In a paradox the 2017 laureate, Kazuo Ishiguro must be keenly aware of as he undergoes this week’s induction process, the Nobel honours authors for their books but asks them to appear in person (though some, such as Bob Dylan last year, refuse) and morph into celebrity performers expert in the very different art of rhetoric.

The contrast was starkly exemplified 20 years after Mann by William Faulkner, whose brief speech (calling for writers to return to the anguish of “the old verities ... of the heart”) was little understood even by anglophone listeners when delivered – he had a heavy southern accent and zero microphone technique – but once it appeared as a text was hailed as an inspirational classic.

(Above, Faulkner with Bertrand Russell at the 1950 Nobel awards)


Kazuo Ishiguro has delivered his acceptance address for the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Writing in The Guardian, John Dugdale has tips for future laureates:

[M]ost attempts include at least three of the following elements: profuse thanks to the Swedish Academy; equally lavish expressions of humility and unworthiness (but don’t overdo this passive-aggressively, like Luigi Pirandello); confessing a personal debt to Scandinavian literature (WB Yeats’s entire speech, for example, consisted of tributes to Swedenborg and Ibsen); a potent childhood memory and a recent anecdote showing how grounded in mundane reality you are. (William Golding talked of being given a parking ticket and congratulations by the same policeman on the day of the prize announcement).