Last week the novelist received the Olof Palme prize for achievement in the spirit of the assassinated Swedish statesman. He reflects on how a lack of leadership today has allowed us to ‘sleepwalk’ into Brexit
A range of emotions, not all of them beautiful, passed through my head at the moment when I was offered the Olof Palme prize.
I am not a hero. I am a fraud. I am being offered a medal for another man’s gallantry. Decline.
I am not a frontline advocate for truth or human rights. I have not suffered for my writing. I have been handsomely rewarded for it.
Neither did I feel myself the equal of any of the three writers who have preceded me at this rostrum: Václav Havel, whom I briefly knew and revered, and the intrepid Roberto Saviano, both of whom in separate ways became martyrs to their work. And Carsten Jensen, writer on world conflict and sharer of its anguish.
If I wanted further proof of my inadequacy, I had only to listen to Daniel Ellsberg’s moving speech at this same rostrum just a year ago. Why didn’t I ever copy secret documents and stop a war?
It was only when I set out to explore the life and work of Olof Palme, and entered his spell, and discovered that same affinity with him that Ellsberg had so eloquently described, that it seemed just possible I might not be quite such a bad fit after all.
Reading and thinking about Palme makes you wonder who you are. And who you might have been, but weren’t. And where your moral courage went when it was needed. You ask yourself what power drove him – golden boy, aristocratic family, brilliant scion of the best schools and the best cavalry regiment – to embrace from the outset of his career the cause of the exploited, the deprived, the undervalued and the unheard?
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