The Nobel Peace Prize award is a question of essences and ethics
By Opinion
by Dr Rudi Buys
Jean Paul Sartre, the French playwright, is thus far the only Nobel Prize recipient to decline the award out of his own will. He reportedly did so as a matter of principle.
Sartre argued that such awards caused writers, when taking a political or literary position, to become untrue to the written word, which should be the only means to offer their work to the world, and to accept such an award would institutionalise his method and thereby also the author, who should always be an independent critic of society.