"for a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment"

Biography:

Derek Walcott (January 23, 1930 in Castries, St. Lucia, and island country located in the Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean Sea) is a prominent poet and playwright won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992.

Walcott is the son of a black woman and white British painter. He was educated undergraduate at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. In 1953 he moved to Trinidad and Tobago, where he founded the Trinity Theater Workshop and produce their first works. In 1981, started living in the United States and work at Harvard University.

"who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality"

Biography:

Born into a working family of four children, Toni Morrison early interest in literature and is passionate in particular to the works of Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy. She enrolled at Howard University in 1945 to study literature and supports a thesis on suicide William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf in 1953 at Cornell University. After graduating, she began a career as a professor at the University of Southern Texas, before returning to Howard (University then "reserved" for blacks).

"who with poetic force creates an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today"

Biography:

He was born and grew up in a village on the island of Shikoku. From primary school he was interested in foreign cultures (through literature), discovering her mother through the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, first in a Japanese translation he learned by heart before discover the original text at the time of the American occupation. Its opening was reinforced by the knowledge of the work of Kazuo Watanabe. At eighteen, he studied French literature at the University of Tokyo. It is still a student he began writing in 1957, strongly influenced by contemporary French literature and American, especially those of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, who will end his brief study . He also studied the work of Louis-Ferdinand Celine that it recognizes as one of its major influences.

"for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past"

Biography:

Seamus Heaney is the eldest of nine children. His father owned a small farm in County Londonderry (or Derry) in Northern Ireland and focuses on the breeding and sale of livestock. His mother came from a family less linked to traditional rural life: family members working at the local textile factory. The poet was able to observe that his parents are two sides of Ireland: the past Gaelic-oriented farming and the Ulster of the Industrial Revolution. He saw one of the fundamental tensions that have shaped and another, also inherited from his parents, being the tension between the floor of a mother binding easily and the silence of a taciturn father.