Alumni and guests are invited to join the Wellington Cambridge Society for their upcoming event. The topic will be The Nobel Prize for Literature:  dynamite and scandal, presented by David Groves (Kings 1957)

David Groves read English at King’s, travelled to Italy on a Vespa and taught at Genoa University for 4 years, then returned to London to head the Italian Department at the Polytechnic of Central London before taking up a position at Victoria University where he taught Italian language and literature, comparative literature, and drama. Since retiring he works as a professional translator. In preparation for a course on the Nobel Prize in Literature delivered at Victoria University’s Department of Lifelong Learning he spent some time in Stockholm researching at the Swedish Academy, where he met various people including Sara Danius who had just been elected as the first-ever woman President of the Academy. He has read at least one work by each of the now 114 Nobel Laureates.

The illustrated talk will aim to cover the following points:

• pros and cons of the Nobel Prize in Literature
• dangers of winning the Nobel Prize
• academies and a potted history of the Swedish Academy
• bombshell and fall-out: Alfred Nobel’s will
• procedures of selection
• a speedy decade-by-decade overview
• the French, the German, Scandinavians, the non-Europeans, the Americans...: “The US is too insulated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature.”
• some fireworks: Churchill, Pasternak, Sartre, Solzhenitsyn, Rushdie, Jelinek, Dylan...
•  the current explosion