The first lecture in the Royal Irish Academy's 2023-24 Discourse Series programme ‘The Nobel Prize and the idea of the universal’ will take place on Tuesday, 17 October at 6pm. This lecture will be delivered by Anders Olsson, Chair of the Nobel Committee, The Swedish Academy. This Discourse will discuss the universal aims of the Nobel Prize in Literature. His respondent will be Anne Fuchs MRIA FBA, Professor of German and Director of the Humanities Institute at University College Dublin.
In this lecture, Professor Olsson will discuss the universal aims of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Nobel Prize is and has always been considered a universal prize. This is perhaps its unique, prestigious and everywhere acknowledged property. In The World Republic of Letters Pascale Casanova even writes: “There is no better measure of the unification of the international literary field than the effectively universal respect commanded by this prize.” How effective the prize is to unify the literary world is open to debate.