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Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Dear Laureates, Ladies and Gentlemen, I remember the day when I was eight years old.
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As I was leaving my afternoon abacus lesson, the skies opened in a sudden downpoura very heavy fall of rain..
This rain was so fierce that two dozen children wound up huddledto stand or sit close together under the eaves of the building.
Across the street was a similar building, and under those eaves, I could see another small crowd.
If I could see another small crowd, it was almost like looking into a mirror.
Watching that streaming rain, the damp soakingto make something completely wet by putting it into liquid. my arms and cuffs, I suddenly understood.
All these people standing with me, shoulder to shoulder, and all those people across the way were living as an 'I' in their own right.
Each one was seeing this rain just as I was; this damp on my face, they felt it as well.
It was a moment of wonder—this experience of so many first-person perspectivesa particular attitude towards or way of regarding something.
Looking back over the time I have spent reading and writing, I have relivedto experience something again in your imagination or memory. this moment of wonder again and again, following the thread of language into the depth of another heart.
An encounter with another interiorthe inside part of something, taking my most vital and most urgent questions, trusting them to that thread and sending them out to other selves.
Ever since I was a child, I have wanted to know the reason we are born, the reason suffering and love exist.
These questions have been asked by literature for thousands of years and continue to be asked today.
What is the meaning of our brief stay in this world?
How difficult is it for us to remain human, come what may, in the darkest night?
There is language that asks what we are made of.
It insists on imagining into the first-person perspectives of the people and living beings that inhabitto live in a place. us, one another.
Literature that deals in this language inevitablycertain to happen holds a kind of body heat.
Just as inevitably, the work of reading and writing literature stands in opposition to all acts that destroy life.
I would like to share the meaning of this award, which is for literature, with you—standing here in opposition to violence—together.
Thank you.
