1957 Nobel Prize in Literature

The 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded the French writer Albert Camus "for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times."[1]

Albert Camus

Aged 44 when he received the prize, Camus is the second youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature.[2]

Laureate
Main article: Albert Camus

Albert Camus was a novelist, essayist and playwright best known for his novels The Stranger (1942), The Plague (1947) and The Fall (1956).[3]

Nominations

Albert Camus was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature on 11 occasions, the first time in 1949.[4] In total the Nobel committee received 66 nominations for 44 individuals in 1957, including André Malraux, Nikos Kazantzakis, Karen Blixen, E. M. Forster, Alberto Moravia, Samuel Beckett, Georges Duhamel, Jules Romains, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ezra Pound, Saint-John Perse, Carlo Levi, Väinö Linna, Boris Pasternak and Robert Frost.[5]

Award ceremony speech

In his award ceremony speech on 10 December 1957 Anders Österling, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said of Camus: "Active and highly creative, Camus is in the centre of interest in the literary world, even outside of France. Inspired by an authentic moral engagement, he devotes himself with all his being to the great fundamental questions of life, and certainly this aspiration corresponds to the idealistic end for which the Nobel Prize was established. Behind his incessant affirmation of the absurdity of the human condition is no sterile negativism. This view of things is supplemented in him by a powerful imperative, a nevertheless, an appeal to the will which incites to revolt against absurdity and which, for that reason, creates a value."[6]

References
  1. "Nobel Prize in Literature 1957". nobelprize.org.
  2. "Camus and his women". The Guardian.
  3. "Albert Camus". Britannica.
  4. "Albert Camus Nomination archive". nobelprize.org.
  5. "Nomination archive". nobelprize.org.
  6. "Award Ceremony speech". nobelprize.org.
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