The 1975 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the Italian poet Eugenio Montale (1896–1981) "for his distinctive poetry which, with great artistic sensitivity, has interpreted human values under the sign of an outlook on life with no illusions". He is the fifth Italian laureate for the literature prize.
Laureate
Along with Giuseppe Ungaretti and Salvatore Quasimodo, Eugenio Montale is associated with the poetic school of hermeticsm, the Italian variant of the French symbolism movement, although Montale himself did not consider himself to be part of the hermetic school. His poetry is often compared to T. S. Eliot. When the Swedish Academy awarded him with the Nobel Prize in 1975, they called him “one of the most important poets of the contemporary West”. His notable oeuvres include Ossi di seppia ("Cuttlefish Bones", 1925), Le occasioni ("The Occasions", 1939), La bufera e altro ("The Storm and Other Things", 1956), Satura (1962–1970) (1971) and Diario del '71 e del '72 (1973).
Deliberations Nominations Montale was first nominated for the prize in 1955 by Nobel laureate T. S. Eliot. It was followed in 1961 and from 1966 he became a regular nominee. By 1974, the Nobel committee had received 27 nominations in total before Montale was eventually awarded.
In 1975, the Swedish Academy received nominations for 114 writers with 22 being from the Nobel Committee itself. Twenty-eight of the nominees were new recommendations such Chinua Achebe, Fernand Braudel, Dobrica Ćosić, Miloš Crnjanski, Mohammed Dib, Gabriel García Márquez (awarded in 1982), Wilson Harris, Masuji Ibuse, Tove Jansson, Naguib Mahfouz (awarded in 1988), Desanka Maksimović, Vasko Popa, Chaim Potok and Mary Renault. The oldest nominee was Estonian poet Marie Under (aged 92) and the youngest was the Irish poet Brendan Kennelly (aged 39). Since the establishment of the awarded, 1975 became the highest number of female contenders in a year with 13 nominees: Anna Banti, Simone de Beauvoir, Doris Lessing (awarded in 2007), Nadine Gordimer (awarded in 1991), Tove Jansson, Rina Lasnier, Desanka Maksimović, Kamala Markandaya, Victoria Ocampo, Mary Renault, Nathalie Sarraute, Anna Seghers and Marie Under.
The authors Peter Anson, Hannah Arendt, Mikhail Bakhtin, Kersti Bergroth, Arthur Herbert Dodd, Julian Huxley, Edward Hyams, Murray Leinster, Constance Malleson, Thomas H. Parry-Williams, Kate Seredy, Robert Cedric Sherriff, Sydney Goodsir Smith, Ivan Sokolov-Mikitov, Elizabeth Taylor and P. G. Wodehouse died in 1975 without having been nominated for the prize.