In his award ceremony speech on 10 December 1982 Lars Gyllensten of the Swedish Academy said that the Academy "could not be said to bring forward an unknown writer", pointing out the unusual success of García Márquez's 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. He spoke of García Márquez as a "rare storyteller richly endowed with a material, from imagination and experience, which seems inexhaustible" and his importance in bringing attention to Latin American literature. "The great novels remind one of William Faulkner", Gyllensten said, "With his stories García Márquez has created a world of his own which is a microcosmos.