Utopia of Life

A New and Sweeping Utopia of Life: Gabriel García Márquez’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech

An ennobled vision for a world “where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible.”

BY MARIA POPOVA

On December 8, 1982, decades after his unlikely beginnings as a writer, Gabriel García Márquez(March 6, 1927–April 17, 2014) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. With the hindsight of a lifetime of reading, he took the stage at the Swedish Academy and delivered his tremendous acceptance speech under the title “The Solitude of Latin America.” The English translation of the transcript was later included in the altogether indispensable tome Nobel Writers on Writing (public library), which also gave us Bertrand Russell on the four desires driving all human behaviorand Pearl S. Buck, the youngest woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, on art, writing, and the nature of creativity./.../