1987 Nobel Prize in Literature

The 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the Russian–American poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996) "for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity."^[1][2][3]

1987 Nobel Prize in Literature
Joseph Brodsky
"for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity."
Date	22 October 1987 (1987-10-22) (announcement) 10 December 1987 (ceremony)
Location	Stockholm, Sweden
Presented by	Swedish Academy
First award	1901
Website	Official website
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Laureate

Main article: Joseph Brodsky

At the age of 18, Joseph Brodsky started writing poetry. His poetry was influenced by British poets like John Donne and W. H. Auden as well as Russian predecessors like Alexander Pushkin and Boris Pasternak. Brodsky's forced exile affected his writing, both thematically and linguistically. He details how he gradually loses hair, teeth, consonants, and verbs in Chast' rechi ("A Part of Speech", 1977). The interaction between the poet and society appears frequently in his poems. According to Brodsky, literature and language are vital tools for the advancement of society and the advancement of human thought. His famous literary and autobiographical essay collection Less Than One: Selected Essays (1986) explores his fellow Russian writers like Dostoyevsky, Mandelstam, and Platonov.^[4][5]

Award ceremony speech

At the award ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December 1987, Sture Allén, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said:

In the remarkable writings to which the Swedish Academy has drawn attention this year, poetry as the highest manifestation of life is a theme throughout. It is developed with a poetic brilliance combined with both intellectual beauty and linguistic mastery. (...) Style and mood alternate in this richly orchestrated poetry. Here is the profound cultural analysis in the essays side by side with the rollicking ironies in the poem History of the Twentieth Century. Yet, for Joseph Brodsky poetry, even in its mirthful moments, is deadly earnest.^[6]