1948 Nobel Prize in Literature
The 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded Thomas Stearns Eliot "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry." Laureate. T.S. Eliot was a highly influential innovator of twentieth century poetry known for works such as "The Waste Land" (1922) and "Four Quartets" (1940). He also wrote essays and plays such as "Murder in the Cathedral" (1935). Nominations. T.S. Eliot was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature on seven occasions, the first time in 1945. In 1948 three nominations for Eliot were submitted. In total the Nobel committee received 45 nominations for 31  individuals in 1948, including the future Nobel Laureates Halldór Kiljan Laxness, Winston Churchill, Boris Pasternak, Mikhail Sholokov and Samuel Joseph Agnon. Other nominated included Angelos Sikelianos, André Malraux, Georges Duhamel, Marie Under and Arnulf Øverland. Nominations this year also included Thomas Mann, the Nobel Prize Laureate in 1929, unconventionally nominated for a second prize by two members of the Swedish Academy. Award ceremony speech. In his award ceremony speech on 10 December 1948, Anders Österling, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said of Eliot: "His career is remarkable in that, from an extremely exclusive and consciously isolated position, he has  gradually come to exercise a very far-reaching influence. At the outset he appeared to address himself to but a small circle of initiates, but this circle slowly widened, without his appearing to will it himself. Thus in Eliot’s verse and prose there was quite a special accent, which compelled attention just in our own time, a capacity to cut into the consciousness of our generation with the sharpness of a diamond."