Because that’s how many there are . More would be nice.
Selma Lagerlöf
Native land: Sweden
Prize year: 1909
Reason: “The lofty idealism, vivid imagination and spiritual perception that characterize her writings.”
Sample: "The stroke of oars was heard among the rushes, and they started up as from sleep. The next moment a flat-bottomed boat appeared, heavy, hollowed out with no skill and with oars as small as sticks. A young girl, who had been picking water-lilies, rowed it. She had dark-brown hair, gathered in great braids, and big dark eyes ; otherwise she was strangely pale. But her paleness toned to pink and not to gray. Her cheeks had no higher color than the rest of her face, the lips had hardly enough. She wore a white linen shirt and a leather belt with a gold buckle. Her skirt was blue with a red hem. She rowed by the outlaws without seeing them. They kept breathlessly still, but not for fear of being seen, but only to be able to really see her. As soon as she had gone they were as if changed from stone images to living beings. Smiling, they looked at one another." (From Invisible Links, translated by Pauline Bancroft Flach.)
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Grazia Deledda
Native land: Italy
Prize year: 1926
Reason: “Idealistically inspired writings which with plastic clarity picture the life on her native island [Sardinia] and with depth and sympathy deal with human problems in general.”
Sample: "And yet it was not the actual thought of Giovanna herself that weighed him down, nor yet his lost happiness, nor the misery that a wholly undeserved fate had forced upon him; all these things had long ago so eaten into his soul that they had come to form a part of his very nature, and he had grown almost to forget them, as one forgets the shirt he has on his back. Now his grief fastened upon memories of certain specific objects which had passed out of the setting of his life, and which he could never recover." (From After the Divorce, translated by Maria Hornor Lansdale.)
Public Domain
Sigrid Undset
Native land: Denmark
Prize year: 1928
Reason: “Powerful descriptions of Northern life during the Middle Ages.”
Sample: "But elsewhere it wasn't customary for the women of the gentry on the large estates to go up to the pastures. Kristin knew that if she did so, people would be surprised and would gossip about it. In God's name, then, let them talk. No doubt they were already talking about her and her family." (From the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy, translated by Tiina Nunnally.)
Public Domain / en.wikipedia.org
Pearl S. Buck
Native land: USA
Prize year: 1938
Reason: “Rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China...and biographical masterpieces.”
Sample: "Wang Lung had his coat off and his back bare, but she worked with her thin garment covering her shoulders and it grew wet and clung to her like skin. Moving together in a perfect rhythm, without a word, hour after hour, he fell into a union with her which took the pain from his labor. He had no articulate thought of anything; there was only this perfect sympathy of movement, of turning this earth of theirs over and over to the sun, this earth which formed their home and fed their bodies and made their gods." (From The Good Earth.)
Hulton Archive / Getty Images
