2016 Annual Report Erasmus Prize A. S. Byatt
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2016 Annual Report Erasmus Prize A. S. Byatt 1 foto Ineke Oostveen Annual Report Erasmus Prize 2016 Life Writing A.S. Byatt 2016 Colophon Annual Report Erasmus Prize © 2016 Photography Jeroen van der Meyde, Ineke Oostveen Illustrations Reynoud Homan Text Praemium Erasmianum Foundation, A.S. Byatt Design Barbara van Santen, Maral Khajeh Published by Stichting Praemium Erasmianum Jan van Goyenkade 5 1075 HN Amsterdam T + 31 (0)20 67 52 753 E [email protected] www.erasmusprijs.org Contents Preface 6 Citation 8 Laudatio 10 Acceptance Speech A.S. Byatt 13 Biography A.S. Byatt 18 Publications 19 Activities 20 Research Prizes 2016 24 Origin and Aim of the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation 32 Board 33 Preface The theme of the 2016 Erasmus Prize was ‘Life Writing’, Besides all the festivities, we suffered a great loss in 2016. a broad concept that encompasses biographies, Max Sparreboom, former director of the Foundation, fell autobiographies and historical novels. The British writer ill shortly after his retirement in January, and passed away Dame Antonia Susan Byatt occupies the very centre on 30 August 2016 at the age of 65. For sixteen years he of this field. Since first gaining recognition with her led the Foundation in an extremely responsible manner. novel Possession in 1990, she has written dozens of The Foundation remembers him with great respect and novels, biographies, short stories and critical essays. A esteem. hallmark of her writing is its great erudition and power of imagination. A ‘born storyteller’, A.S. Byatt plunges Finally, the 2016 Erasmus Prize was the final award made the reader into the history of European thinking, taking under the chairmanship of Martijn Sanders. In his ten major questions about scholarship, history and identity years as chairman of the Foundation, he committed as the starting point for her books. Moreover, she has a himself to the Erasmus Prize with great dedication. The deep affinity with visual art, a passion that permeates her board is extremely grateful to him for all his work. life and work. Her enthusiastic personality and extensive body of work has been extensively celebrated over this Ernst Hirsch Ballin, chairman past year. Shanti van Dam, director A.S. Byatt’s numerous interests were reflected in a wide-ranging programme of activities devoted to her work. From lectures, congresses, public interviews and book presentations, to publications and a nationwide writing competition. This annual report contains a short account of these activities. In organizing these events, we found committed partners in the British Embassy, De Balie, De Bezige Bij, De Gids, De Groene Amsterdammer, De Nederlandse Boekengids, Erasmus Festival Brabant, Huizinga Instituut, Humanity in Action, Museum Meermanno, the Netherlands Research School for Literary Studies, Paradiso, SLAA, the Universities of Amsterdam, Utrecht and Maastricht, VPRO and Writers Unlimited. The highlight of the year was the Erasmus Prize award ceremony on 8 December 2016. During a festive event held at the Royal Palace in Amsterdam, His Majesty the King presented the Erasmus Prize to A.S. Byatt in the presence of Her Majessty the Queen and Her Majesty Princess Beatrix. We are grateful for the hospitality shown to us by the Royal Family. In addition to the Erasmus Prize, the Foundation presented its annual Research Prizes to five young doctoral students. This year’s joyful ceremony took place again at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. 6 7 Citation Article 2 of the Constitution of the Praemium • The jury describes A.S. Byatt as a born storyteller Erasmianum Foundation reads as follows: with a keen eye for relationships in public and “Within the context of the cultural traditions of Europe private life. in general and the ideas of Erasmus in particular, the aim of the Foundation is to enhance the position of the • Many of her novels and her critical work explore the humanities, the social sciences and the arts. The emphasis act of writing biography or conducting research. In lies on tolerance, cultural diversity and non-dogmatic, the process, A.S. Byatt has reshaped the genre of life critical thinking. The Foundation tries to achieve this aim writing in her own unique way. by awarding prizes and by other means. A cash prize is awarded under the name of ‘Erasmus Prize’.” In accordance with this article, the Board of the In her wide-ranging body Foundation has decided to award the Erasmus Prize 2016 to the British writer Dame Antonia Susan Byatt. of work she unites great intellectual force with The prize is awarded to A.S. Byatt on the following grounds: unbridled imaginative • Her work crosses boundaries in style and content. It power. covers an enormous range of genres, literary forms and subjects. She immerses the reader in the history of European thinking, taking the big questions about science, history and identity as her starting point. • In her wide-ranging body of work she unites great intellectual force with unbridled imaginative power. • Central to her work is a reinvention of ‘old tales in new forms’. In revisiting myths and fairy tales, she turns them into a lasting reflection on the European history of ideas in narrative form. • Among her recurring themes are the influence of art on life, magic and realism, and the conflict between ambition and family. 8 Director Shanti van Dam presents the citation during the Erasmus Prize Award Ceremony on 8 December, Royal Palace Amsterdam. Erasmus Prize Award Ceremony 2016, Royal Palace Amsterdam. Photos by Jeroen van der Meyde. 9 Laudatio Your Majesties, Your Royal Highness, Your Excellencies, Our laureate, A.S. Byatt, lives in the heart of the genre. In Ladies and Gentlemen, her multifaceted and highly diverse oeuvre, comprising dozens of novels, short stories, critical essays and works The Erasmus Prize was instated in a time of great of non-fiction, reflections on biography and portraiture optimism about a new Europe. What is left of this idea of are never far away. Europe today? Where can we find a shared past to build on and find inspiration to create our future? Our laureate Searching, investigating and digging through documents today is a prominent participant in the current debate. from the past - it is the academic pursuit of the two Not as a politician, nor an activist. But by passionately protagonists in her most famous and much beloved novel cultivating the life of the mind through writing. She writes, Possession: A Romance, published in 1990. Inquisitive narrates and conjures up stories about European lives and and obsessed by their subject matter, like Byatt herself, European ideas, and she shows us how they live on. the researchers become entangled in a web of mysteries garnished by an exquisite pastiche of genres and literary Dame Antonia Susan Byatt once described how she fireworks. Seemingly effortlessly, the author seams became European: through literature. Asthmatic as a together diary entries, 20th-century dialogue and 19th- child, she was often confined to her bed. So she read century poetry. Readers are startled once they discover voraciously. A wide-ranging literary palette was central that the Victorian poetry which seduced them so to her education, and from an early age her conceptual thoroughly in this romantic story was in fact crafted from world included the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Arthurian beginning to end by the author Byatt herself. Seldom legends, the Norse and Icelandic sagas. She read Cicero has a novel illustrated so beautifully how reality and and Livy alongside Kleist and Virgil, and Racine alongside literature can become enmeshed, how thin the mirrored Thomas Mann. At university she not only mastered foreign wall between reality and the imagination can become. languages, but also studied literature through those languages. During an extended stay in the United States, “Whether you are reading or writing a novel,” she once Byatt steeped herself in American literature, striving to told me in an interview, “in both cases you are trying to pinpoint exactly what it means to be American, and how fundamentally understand something or someone.” that identity influences one’s writing. It was during this period that she first became conscious of the fact that Her book The Biographer’s Tale, about the complex she herself was a European. Although she was fascinated relationship between the biographer and the object of by American literature, the authors she studied never his or her study, was written purposefully as an answer became part of her own literary consciousness, as was the to Possession, to function as its counter-voice. In this case with Balzac, Racine and Thomas Mann. Her personal investigation into the pains and difficulties of the work myths were Scandinavian, Germanic, European, and their of the biographer, the clever ‘Droste effect’ or mise en names were Ragnarök, Faust and À la recherche du temps abyme, so masterfully drawn by Byatt, is a means to an perdu. Indeed, Proust’s ruminations on artistic awakening end, showing how biographical work is full of pitfalls and and life experience have been influential in paving the way complexities, in which the end result tells us so much for what we now call ‘Life Writing’. about the biographer himself, and conveys so little about the one who is portrayed. Being in conversation with For ‘Life Writing’, ladies and gentlemen, is the theme of this and in contradiction to each other, Possession and The year’s Erasmus Prize. A relatively new term, it denotes a Biographer’s Tale in the end convey the same message, as literary genre that encompasses autobiography, biography, Byatt herself has stated. “It is impossible to truly know the so-called ‘ego document’, and the historical novel. Both ‘the other’, maybe especially the object of your admiration the general public and academic world share an interest and affection.” in ‘Life Writing’ as a means of reflecting on one’s own While these novels explore the relationship between life through insight into the lives of others, a means of biography and identity, a preoccupation in much of her studying the complex process of identity formation.