Collection

Laureates

Writing by Nobel Prize winners from the LRB archive: Kazuo Ishiguro, Doris Lessing, Seamus Heaney, Isaac Bashevis Singer, John Hume, Nadine Gordimer and Amartya Sen.

Uchi

Kazuo Ishiguro, 1 August 1985

The British and the Japanese may not be particularly alike, but the two races are exceedingly comparable. The British must actually believe this, for why else would they be displaying such a...

Unwritten Novels

Doris Lessing, 11 January 1990

There are some subjects it is almost impossible to believe have never found a novelist. How about Marx’s household? It was a composite of Victorian dramatic stereotypes.

Sounding Auden

Seamus Heaney, 4 June 1987

Hard-bitten, aggressively up-to-date in the way it took cognisance of the fallen contemporary landscape, yet susceptible also to the pristine scenery of an imaginary Anglo-Saxon England, Auden’s original voice could not have been predicted and was utterly timely.

In recent times in Ireland we have been reminded of a lot of anniversaries. Remembering the past is something of an obsession here. The future, discussing it or shaping it, doesn’t seem...

Story: ‘Letter from his Father’

Nadine Gordimer, 20 October 1983

My dear son,

You wrote me a letter you never sent.

It wasn’t for me – it was for the whole world to read. (You and your instructions that everything should be burned. Hah!) You were...

On the Darwinian View of Progress

Amartya Sen, 5 November 1992

It is now a century and a third, almost exactly, since the publication in 1859 of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. In this period the view of evolutionary progress introduced by Darwin...

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