The Nobel Prize in Literature is a hit, have you read their works?
Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale".
As soon as October enters each year, the topic of the Nobel Prize in Literature begins to heat up.
Compared with the Physics Award and Biology Award, which have relatively high barriers to understanding, it seems that the literary awards where everyone can express some opinions are the most concerned.
As the date for the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2020 approaches, it is best for literature lovers not to just know the names of some popular writers. Every year, except for the only Nobel Prize winner, other people who can become popular predictors are also A master writer who is worthy of in-depth understanding and reading.
"Queen of Canadian Literature" Atwood:
Serious literature can also "out of the circle"
Representative work: "The Handmaid's Story"
The Canadian female writer Margaret Atwood is an existence that cannot be ignored.
As one of the representatives of the rise of Canadian literature in recent years, Atwood won the Booker Prize in 2000.
The Booker Prize is the highest award in contemporary English fiction and one of the most influential literary awards in the world.
And although her novel is a serious one, but because it was adapted into a TV series, it has "out of the circle" fans.
Atwood's most influential work is the dystopian work "The Handmaid's Tale", which suddenly became a global bestseller thirty years after its publication.
"The Handmaid's Tale" is a novel of the future, and the farthest time it describes is more than two hundred years after the writing of the novel.
A woman who unfortunately became a "handmaid" in Gilead and later escaped by chance. The voice recorded on the tape was discovered by several historians. It tells a story that happened before that time, that the protagonist will be in the 21st century. The first personal experience is mixed with the protagonist's many memories and reflections on life in the 1980s.
Novels like "The Handmaid's Tale" are also called speculative "suspicious novels" in Western criticism circles. They describe the future, but are not science fiction in the usual sense.
Although future novels contain science fiction elements, they have strong cultural content.
It tells the future that has become history, thus making it reachable.
Atwood said that all the details used in "The Handmaid's Tale" have happened in history.
In other words, it is not science fiction.
Atwood's Gilead is by no means groundless.
Like all future novels, its narrative time is based on a certain future moment, telling the future that has become the past at that moment.
It belongs to the future, but the story is not far away from us.
The accessibility is exactly the focus of future novels—according to the status quo of today's society, what will happen if it develops.
Born in Atwood in Ottawa in 1939, he followed the straightforward and orthodox academic route to study: a bachelor's degree from the University of Toronto and a master's degree from Cambridge. Obviously, the experience has not hindered the recognition of his academic achievements in the circle. Nowadays, there are more than 10 prestigious universities in various countries that only award Atwood with an "honorary doctorate" and hire him to teach or write in residence.
Atwood's creative journey can be described as singing all the way. He published his first poem at the age of 19. Since the mid-1960s, he has continued to create prosperous creativity without giving critics and readers any chance to forget her.
14 collections of poems, 11 novels, 5 collections of short stories, and 3 literary reviews are all solid masterpieces, plus films, dramas, and children’s literature that are scattered in major mainstream media. The outline of the "all-round development" in the field of literature is awe-inspiring.
In recent years, Atwood's call for the Nobel Prize has increased.
Her readers also look forward to the glorious moment.
Some people even imagined the award speech for Atwood, and guessed that she would like it: "When Margaret Atwood removed the stubborn stone weighing on the words and soul, what was shown to the world was A world that is both vast and subtle, a world that breaks through time and space, gender, and style."
91 years old Milan Kundera:
Not far from the Nobel Prize in Literature?
Representative work: "The Unbearable Lightness of Life"
On September 20, 2020, Vladimir Zelezny, President of the Kafka Association, announced that the Czech writer Milan Kundera has won this year's Kafka Prize.
Milan Kundera now lives in Paris. He responded to the news of his award by phone: I am very happy to accept this award and feel honored.
Kundera, 91 years old, was born in the Czech Republic and has been living in France since 1975.
Zelezny said that the jury admired Kundera's life's work very much. His work has been translated into more than 40 languages, making an extraordinary contribution to Czech culture.
Kundera has been writing in French since the 1990s. He is well-known in China. His works include "Jokes" (1967), "The Unbearable Lightness of Life" (1984), and "Laughing Forget Books" (1978) and "Immortal" (1990), "Celebrating Meaningless" (2013), etc.
Especially "Living Elsewhere" and "The Unbearable Lightness of Life" have a large number of readers and fans in China.
"The Unbearable Lightness of Life" was first published in 1984. The novel describes the emotional life between Thomas, Tereza and Salina.
But it is not a triangular love story of a man and two women, but a philosophical novel that brings readers into thinking about a series of human nature issues, such as lightness and weight, spirit and flesh.
The Kafka Prize, the Kafka Prize for Literature, with its full name Franz Kafka Prize, was founded in 2001 to commemorate the great novelist Kafka in the 20th century. It is selected once a year.
The winners can go to the City Hall of the Old Town of Prague to receive a bonus of US$10,000 from the Mayor of Prague and others, as well as a small bronze statue of Kafka made based on a local memorial statue in Prague.
The award is mainly given to writers whose works are of humanistic concern.
In 2006, Japanese writer Haruki Murakami became the first writer in Asia to win the award.
In 2014, Chinese writer Yan Lianke won the award.
It is particularly noteworthy that the winners of the Kafka Prize have overlapped with the winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, including the 2004 Austrian female writer Alfred Jelinek and the British dramatist Harold Pinter, German writer Peter Handke, etc.
For many years before, Milan Kundera had always been a popular predictor of the Nobel Prize, but he ended up "accompanying the run" for many years.
Winning the Kafka Prize this time, for Milan Kundera, may be a signal of the arrival of the Nobel Prize.
Cover Journalist Zhang Jie