Jan Myrdal’s big prize – the Lenin Award goes to Martin Hägglund with the following justification:
“With the deepest knowledge, prophetic seriousness and supreme philosophical overview, Martin Hägglund in his monumental work “This Life – Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom” fixes his gaze on the morally decisive life questions for us humans about the meaning of existence in a self-evident yet completely new way. Like a contemporary inquisitive Socrates, this socialist and teacher of wisdom accompanies us on a journey through the history of literature and philosophy and with examples from these wells of human experience and multi-thousand-year traditions builds an astonishingly beautiful and artistic cathedral of thought and hopeful utopia about what we for our own and for everyone else’s sake should, can and must do with the dizzyingly short moment we wander around on this earth. Never has the beautiful gospel of liberty, equality and fraternity been embodied more fully, consistently, and vigorously.”
