For further information, please go to the conference website: https://www.yeatsnobel2023.se/

William Butler Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in Stockholm in December 1923. This was an event that in many ways solidified Yeats’s place as one of the writers of the twentieth century, both home and abroad. The award placed him in the company of such luminaries as Rabindranath Tagore, Rudyard Kipling and Knut Hamsun, and later laureates have ranged from Samuel Beckett and Winston Churchill to Seamus Heaney and last year’s winner, Annie Ernaux. The award was an important event in Yeats’s life, associated both with the elevated (in Yeats’s memories of the lavish ceremony) and the mundane (as in anecdotes, such as the one involving the Yeatses cooking sausages to celebrate the news of the award). Both Yeats’s lecture delivered to the Swedish Royal Academy, ‘The Irish Dramatic Movement’, and his travelogue ‘The Bounty of Sweden’, are significant parts of his oeuvre, the former particularly due to the way in which he selectively singled out Lady Gregory and John Millington Synge when commemorating ‘the labours, triumphs and troubles of my fellow-workers’ in the establishment of the Abbey Theatre.