Behind this dustcover is a book of poems by Tomas Tranströmer, which was used by Peter Englund while working on the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2011. The half-removed cover tells us that the process of choosing a Nobel Prize laureate is highly confidential. Englund used the dustcover to hide what he was reading. He was the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy at the time, and it was his job to announce the name of the laureate to the media. Soon after the announcement, Englund could tear of the dustcover of the book he was carrying. The book also contains a scrap of paper with Tranströmer’s home telephone number, Englund’s comments from when he was preparing his announcement, and a note with the exact wording of the announcement.
The book was donated to the Nobel Prize Museum by Peter Englund in 2014.
In 1946, when Tomas Tranströmer was fifteen, he began using this notebook. Insects were one of his great interests early in life, and the first page shows a drawing of a beetle. A few years later, in 1951, when he started writing poems, he began to use the notebook again. On the page that is open here is a draft version of the first poem in his debut collection Seventeen Poems from 1954. Tranströmer’s interest in music, which isevident in his poems, is also noticeable in the notebook, in the form of drafts for musical compositions.
Tomas Tranströmer donated the notebook to the Nobel Prize Museum in 2011.
