For a writer, there is hardly any greater honor than winning the Nobel Prize for literature. And for a woman writer, claiming the prize is even harder, for only eight women once won it. Austria’s Elfriede Jelinek is the ninth and the first since 1996. The Stockholm-based Swedish Academy announced last Thursday that Jelinek won this year’s Nobel Prize in literature. She is recognized for her socially critical(批判的) novels and plays. Jelinek, 57, made her literary debut (初次露面) in 1967. She has written plays, novels and poetry. She is best known for her autobiographical 1983 novel “The Piano Teacher”, made into a movie in 2001. The basic theme of her work is the inability of women to live as people beyond the roles and personalities traditionally expected of them. Her characters struggle to lead lives not normally acceptable in society. “The nature of Jelinek’s texts is often hard to define. They shift between prose(散文) and poetry and songs, they contain theatrical scenes and film script,” said the academy. The Nobel Prize was founded by Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. Nobel died in 1896 and left his fortune of about US $920 million to a fund to honor people who have helped other human beings. This year each prize is worth US $13 million. 小题1: The underlined word “them” in the last second paragraph refers to _______.
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