THE LEDGER-STAR
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, October 13, 1994 TAG: 9410130672
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN LENGTH: Short : 48 lines
Kenzaburo Oe, a novelist and essayist from Japan, won the Nobel prize in literature today.
Oe, 59, was cited for his ``poetic force (which) creates an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today,'' said an announcement by the literature committee of the Swedish Academy.
The prize is worth $930,000.
Among his most important works was the 1967 novel ``The Silent Cry,'' which deals with people's relationship in a world where ``knowledge, passions, dreams, ambitions and attitudes merge into each other,'' the academy said.
Oe is the second Japanese writer to win the Nobel literature prize. In 1968, the academy honored Yasunari Kawabata.
Oe was born in an isolated village on Japan's southern island of Shikoku, the third of seven children.
A visit to Hiroshima, devastated by the atom bomb, inspired his 1964 story ``Aghwee the Sky Monster'' and a longer work entitled ``Hiroshima Notes.''
Oe's translator, John Nathan, has said the author's war-haunted childhood and coming of age during the American occupation helped make him a spokesman for an alienated postwar generation.
Authors from Belgium, Portugal, Estonia, Hungary and Ireland were among those mentioned most often in the runup to today's naming of the winner.
Last year's winner was Toni Morrison from the United States. She was preceded by West Indian poet Derek Walcott of St. Lucia, Nadine Gordimer of South Africa in 1991, and Mexican Octavio Paz in 1990.
Names mentioned this year include Estonian novelist Jaan Kross, Belgian poet-playwright Hugo Claes, Hungarian author Gyorgy Konrad, Irish poet Seamus Heaney and two Portuguese novelists, Jose Saramago and Antonio Lobo Antunes. So too was the Syrian-born Lebanese poet Ali Ahmed Saeed, who writes under the name Adonis. ILLUSTRATION: EXCERPT OF OE'S WORK
[For an excerpt, see microfilm for this date.]
KEYWORDS: NOBEL PRIZE by CNB