Reception speech for the Holberg Prize

Minister, Excellency, Officers of the Ludwig Holberg Memorial Fund, Ladies and gentlemen, colleagues, friends and family.
There is something slightly reassuring in having people like me receiving an award such as the one you have decided to bestow on my work tonight. Through sheer labour, ordinary people may achieve something that no one could have predicted from the way their mind works or from their personality. Having worried all my life about the fact that a white provincial male of bourgeois extraction and of limited intellectual skills could not possibly be the real target of the thoughts that had traversed his desk since he was sixteen, I am now totally reassured: everyone is able to tackle problems of vastly disproportionate size and even have the good fortune, if not to solve them, at least to give them a more reasonable shape. Reassured that it is not me but those slightly reshaped problems that are rewarded tonight, it is to them that I may now safely turn.