Sixty-three years ago today, Ivo Andrić became a Nobel laureate, and to this day remains our only Nobel Prize winner. On this day, at the grand ceremony for the Nobel Prizes in Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, and Literature, held in the magnificent concert hall of the Swedish Academy, he received this prestigious award.
In the final shortlist, alongside our writer, were English writers Lawrence Durrell and Graham Greene, American John Steinbeck, and Italian Alberto Moravia.
The Nobel Prize, as it is today, consisted of three parts: a medal (with the name and likeness of Alfred Nobel on the obverse, and the recipient’s name and year on the reverse), a diploma, unique to each recipient, hand-painted by an artist with motifs from the recipient’s work (Andrić’s has a bridge, a flag, and characters from his literature), and a monetary part of about a million euros.
FIND OUT MORE IN SERBIAN:
Ivo Andrić showed his greatness not only with this great recognition but also by the fact that he donated the entire amount (about a million euros today) of the Nobel Prize.
“Ivo Andrić donated the entire sum to Bosnia and Herzegovina for the construction of libraries and the purchase of books. Probably due to his knowledge of the people’s mentality, he first donated half of the money, then requested reports on how the money was spent, and then donated the second part,” writes the portal krug.rs.
In addition, the writer also donated the monetary amount of the AVNOJ Award from 1967 and the Twenty-Seventh of July Award from 1970 for the development of librarianship in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
MORE TOPICS:
Izvor: Blic, Foto: Wikipedia/ Stevan Kragujević