Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez were recognised for discovering that there was an invisible and extremely heavy object at the centre of our galaxy, which could be seen affecting the orbits of the stars that surrounded it. A supermassive black hole is the only known explanation, and that mysterious object has become known as Sagittarius A*.

Roger Penrose will share the award for breakthroughs in mathematical methods that led to the exploration of the general theory of relativity developed by Einstein, who himself did not believe that black holes really exist. Professor Penrose showed that the theory leads to the formation of black holes.

Physics has often been one of the most prominent of the Nobel awards, and Einstein perhaps its most famous winner, with an award that recognised his work on the nature of the universe, including the theory of relativity. The committee said that Professor Penrose’s work was the most significant contribution to that theory since Einstein’s work.

 “The discoveries of this year’s laureates have broken new ground in the study of compact and supermassive objects,” said David Haviland, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, in a statement. “But these exotic objects still pose many questions that beg for answers and motivate future research.

“Not only questions about their inner structure, but also questions about how to test our theory of gravity under the extreme conditions in the immediate vicinity of a black hole.”

Professor Penrose was born in the UK and is based at the University of Oxford. Professor Genzel was born in Germany, and Professor Ghez was born in the US, and both are now based at universities in California.

They will together share the prize of 10 million Swedish kronor, or about $1.1m. Professor Penrose will receive half while Professor Genzel and Professor Ghez will share the other half.

Professor Ghez is only the fourth woman to be recognised with the prize for physics. She follows Marie Curie in 1903, Maria Goeppert Mayer in 1963 and Donna Strickland in 2018.

source: The Independent

Nobel Prize permanent secretary Sara Danius said:  “He is a great poet in the English tradition.”

Dylan is the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature since author Toni Morrison in 1993.

Speaking after the announcement, Danius compared Dylan to the Ancient Greek poets: “Homer and Sappho – they wrote poetic texts that were meant to be performed with instruments…. it’s the same with Bob Dylan,” she said.

Best known for his early hits such as Blowin’ in the Wind and Like a Rolling Stone, Dylan was a key member of the 1960s alternative folk movement, though he shocked his contemporaries by being one of the first folk musicans to “go electric” in 1965.

Sara Danius added that he was “a great sampler … and for 54 years he has been at it, reinventing himself.”

The 75-year-old American songwriter follows writers including Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and Alice Munro in receiving the prestigious award. Dylan has previously won 11 Grammy Awards, and an Oscar for his song Things Have Changed, used in the 2000 film Wonder Boys.

Though best known for his extensive career as a singer-songwriter, and his role as a pivotal figure in 1960s counter-culture, Dylan has also written a collection of experimental prose poetry, 1971’s Tarantula.

Bob Dylan is the first musician to win the award, and his selection is perhaps the most radical choice in a history stretching back to 1901. In choosing a popular musician for the literary world’s highest honor, the Swedish Academy, which awards the prize, dramatically redefined the boundaries of literature, setting off a debate about whether song lyrics have the same artistic value as poetry or novels.

Some prominent writers celebrated Mr. Dylan’s literary achievements, including Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates and Salman Rushdie, who called Mr. Dylan “the brilliant inheritor of the bardic tradition,” adding, “Great choice.”

But others called the academy’s decision misguided and questioned whether song writing, however brilliant, rises to the level of literature.

Bob Dylan has often sprinkled literary allusions into his music and cited the influence of poetry on his lyrics, and has referenced Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine and Ezra Pound.

Literary scholars have long debated whether Dylan’s lyrics can stand on their own as poetry, and an astonishing volume of academic work has been devoted to parsing his music. The Oxford Book of American Poetry included his song “Desolation Row,” in its 2006 edition, and Cambridge University Press released “The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan” in 2009, further cementing his reputation as a brilliant literary stylist.

In giving the literature prize to Bob Dylan, the Academy may also be recognizing that the gap has closed between high art and more commercial creative forms.

“It’s literature, but it’s music, it’s performance, it’s art, it’s also highly commercial,” said David Hajdu, a music critic for The Nation who has written extensively about Bob Dylan and his contemporaries. “The old categories of high and low art, they’ve been collapsing for a long time, but this is it being made official.”

It’s not the first time the Academy has stretched the definition of literature. In 1953, Winston Churchill received the prize, in part as recognition of the literary qualities of his soaring political speeches and “brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values,” according to the Academy. And many were surprised last year, when the prize went to the Belarussian journalist Svetlana Alexievich, whose deeply reported narratives draw on oral history.

Bob Dylan, whose original name is Robert Allen Zimmerman, was born on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minn. He emerged on the New York music scene in 1961 as an artist singing protest songs and strumming an acoustic guitar in clubs and cafes in Greenwich Village. But from the start he stood out for dazzling lyrics and an oblique song writing style that made him a source of fascination for artists and critics. In 1963, the folk group Peter, Paul and Mary reached No. 2 on the Billboard pop chart with a version of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” whose ambiguous refrains evoked Ecclesiastes.

Within a few years Bob Dylan was confounding the very notion of folk music, with ever more complex songs and moves toward a more rock ’n’ roll sound.

After reports of a motorcycle accident in 1966 near his home in Woodstock, N.Y., he withdrew further from public life but remained intensely fertile as a songwriter. His voluminous archives, showing his working process through thousands of pages of song writing drafts, were acquired this year by institutions in Tulsa, Okla.

source: The Telegraph

Can you match Bob Dylan’s lyrics with the title of his songs?

Key

1. e.

2. d.

3. b.

4. c.

5. a. 

Kertész, whose family was Jewish, then returned to Hungary. The trauma of his life, the Holocaust, is the main theme of his literature. His best-known novel, “Fatelessness,” which he spent 13 years working on, is one of the most painful and brutal writings about the Holocaust.

In this novel a 14-year-old boy describes his deportation to Auschwitz and Buchenwald. It’s a first-person narrative told from the naïve perspective of a child.

The young narrator tries his very best to do everything right while in the camp. He doesn’t grasp the deadly reality of the gas chambers. Kertész writes without detailed explanations – which adds to the horrors the reader feels. “I have written this novel like someone who struggles to feel his way towards the exit in the pitch-black deepness of a cellar,” remarked Kertész about his novel, pointing out, however, that it should not be seen as an autobiographical work: “What I write, is not me. It is only one of the possibilities of me. “

The objective of Kertész has always been to unmask people in a totalitarian system. In his books, he describes a new type of person: “It was a type of man who either forgets, or falsifies, his biography without being aware of it. In these dictatorships, one got immersed in situations that were so fantastic that one could not immediately grasp them, and that’s why one adapted to the situation in order to survive,” explained Kertész in October 2013 in an interview with the Sunday edition of the Swiss daily, “Neue Zürcher Zeitung.”

“Fatelessness” was first published in Hungary in 1975. At first, the impressive testimonial of a Holocaust survivor was ignored and hushed up. Only in the 1990s, when his works were published in German, did Imre Kertész achieve world fame. In 2002, his literary career reached its climax: he received the Literature Nobel Prize which brought him the long-deserved recognition and appreciation.

He returned to Hungary in 2012 with his second wife, Magda.

Auschwitz was the theme of his life. And, fortunately, Imre Kertész has told us that story in his effort to fight against forgetting, a fate that the “fateless” in his novel feared most.

source: Deutsche Welle

An extract from Fatelessness:

“The main thing was not to neglect oneself; somehow there would always be a way, for it had never yet happened that there wasn’t a way somehow, as Bandi Citrom instilled in me, and he in turn had been instructed in this wisdom by the labor camp. The first and most important thing under all circumstances was to wash oneself (before the parallel rows of troughs with the perforated iron piping, in the open air, on the side of the camp over toward the highway). Equally essential was a frugal apportioning of the rations, whether or not there were any. Whatever rigor this disciplining might cost you, a portion of the bread ration had to be left for the next morning’s coffee, some of it indeed – by maintaining an undeflectable guard against the inclination of your every thought, and above all your itching fingers, to stray toward your pocket – for the lunch break: that way, and only that way, could you avoid, for instance, the tormenting thought that you had nothing to eat. That the item in your wardrobe I had hitherto regarded as a handkerchief was a foot cloth; that the only secure place to be at roll call and in a marching column was always the middle of a row; that even when soup was being dished out one would do better to aim, not for the front, but for the back of the queue, where you could predict they would be serving from the bottom of the vat, and therefore from the thicker sediment; that one side of the handle of your spoon could be hammered out into a tool that might also serve as a knife – all these things, and much else besides, all of it knowledge essential to prison life, I was taught by Bandi Citrom, learning by watching and myself striving to emulate.” (translated by Tim Wilkinson)