The
Nobel Prize in
Literature ( ) is awarded annually, since 1901, to an
author from any country who has, in the words from the will of
Alfred Nobel, produced "in the field of
literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction"
(original Swedish:
den som inom litteraturen har producerat det
utmärktaste i idealisk riktning). The "work" in this case
refers to an author's work as a whole, though individual works are
sometimes also cited.
The Swedish Academy
decides who, if anyone, will receive the prize in
any given year and announces the name of the chosen laureate in
early October.
Nobel's choice of emphasis on "idealistic" or "ideal" (in English
translation) in his criteria for the Nobel Prize in Literature has
led to recurrent controversy. (In the original Swedish, the word
idealisk can be translated as either "idealistic" or
"ideal".) In the early twentieth century, the
Nobel Committee interpreted the intent of
the will strictly and did not award certain world-renowned authors
of the time such as
James Joyce,
Leo Tolstoy,
Henrik Ibsen and
Henry
James. More recently, the wording has been interpreted more
liberally, and the Prize is awarded both for lasting literary merit
and for evidence of consistent idealism on some significant level,
most recently a kind of idealism championing human rights on a
broad scale, and hence more political, some would argue.
"The highlight of the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony in Stockholm is
when each Nobel Laureate steps forward to receive the prize from
the hands of His Majesty the King of Sweden. ... Under the eyes of
a watching world, the Nobel Laureate receives three things: a
diploma, a medal, and a document confirming the prize amount". The
2009 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to
Herta Müller. She was cited as someone,
"who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose,
depicts the landscape of the dispossessed". ; she received a prize
amount of 10,000,000
SEK (slightly
more than
€1 million, or
US$1.4 million).
The Swedish Academy has attracted significant criticism in recent
years. Some contend that many well-known writers have not been
awarded the prize or even been nominated, whereas others contend
that some well-known recipients do not deserve it. There have also
been controversies involving alleged political interests relating
to the nomination process and ultimate selection of some of the
recent literary Laureates.
Nomination procedure

2008 Announcement of the Nobel Prize
Laureate in Literature at the Swedish Academy, Stockholm
Each year
the Swedish
Academy
sends out requests for nominations of candidates
for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Members of the Academy, members of literature academies and
societies, professors of literature and language, former Nobel
literature laureates, and the presidents of writers' organizations
are all allowed to nominate a candidate. However, it is not
permitted to nominate oneself.
Thousands of requests are sent out each year, and about fifty
proposals are returned. These proposals must be received by the
Academy by 1 February, after which they are examined by the Nobel
Committee.By April, the Academy narrows the field to around twenty
candidates, and by summer the list is reduced further to some five
names. The subsequent months are then spent in reviewing the works
of eligible candidates. In October members of the Academy vote and
the candidate who receives more than half of the votes is named the
Nobel Laureate in Literature. The process is similar to that of
other Nobel Prizes.
The prize money of the Nobel Prize has been fluctuating since its
inauguration but at present stands at ten million
Swedish kronor.
The winner also
receives a gold medal and a Nobel diploma and is invited to give a
lecture during "Nobel Week" in Stockholm
; the highlight is the prize-giving ceremony and
banquet on December 10.
Controversies about Nobel Laureate selections
Prize in
Literature has a history of
controversial awards and notorious snubs. Notable literati have
pointed out that more indisputably major writers have been ignored
by the Nobel Committee than have been honored by it, including
Marcel Proust,
Ezra Pound,
James
Joyce,
Vladimir Nabokov,
Jorge Luis Borges,
August Strindberg,
John Updike,
Arthur
Miller, and others, often for political or extra-literary
reasons. Conversely, many writers whom contemporary and subsequent
criticism regard as minor, inconsequential or transitional have
been the recipient of the award.
From 1901 to 1912, the committee was characterized by an
interpretation of the "ideal direction" stated in Nobel's will as
"a lofty and sound idealism", which caused
Leo Tolstoy,
Henrik
Ibsen,
Émile Zola and
Mark Twain to be rejected. Also, many believe
Sweden's historic antipathy towards Russia was the reason neither
Tolstoy nor
Anton
Chekhov were awarded the prize. During World War I and its
immediate aftermath, the committee adopted a policy of neutrality,
favouring writers from non-combatant countries.
Czech writer
Karel Čapek's "War
With the Newts" was considered too offensive to the German
government, and he declined to suggest some noncontroversial
publication that could be cited as an example of his work ("Thank
you for the good will, but I have already written my doctoral
dissertation"). He was thus denied the prize.
French
novelist and intellectual André
Malraux was seriously considered for the prize in the 1950s,
according to Swedish
Academy
archives studied by newspaper Le Monde on their opening in 2008.
Malraux was competing with
Albert
Camus, but was rejected several times, especially in 1954 and
1955, "so long as he does not come back to novel", and Camus won
the prize in 1957.
Some attribute
W. H. Auden's not being
awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature to errors in his translation
of 1961
Peace Prize winner
Dag Hammarskjöld's
Vägmärken (Markings) and to statements that Auden made
during a Scandinavian lecture tour suggesting that Hammarskjöld
was, like Auden,
homosexual.
In 1964
Jean-Paul Sartre was
awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but he declined it, stating
that "It is not the same thing if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre or if I
sign Jean-Paul Sartre, Nobel Prize winner. A writer must refuse to
allow himself to be transformed into an institution, even if it
takes place in the most honorable form."
Soviet
dissident writer Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn, the 1970 prize winner, did not attend the Nobel
Prize ceremony in Stockholm for fear that the U.S.S.R.
would
prevent his return afterwards (his works there were circulated in
samizdat—clandestine form).
After the Swedish government refused to honor Solzhenitsyn with a
public award ceremony and lecture at its Moscow embassy,
Solzhenitsyn refused the award altogether, commenting that the
conditions set by the Swedes(who preferred a private ceremony) were
"an insult to the Nobel Prize itself." Solzhenitsyn did not accept
the award, and prize money, until 10 December 1974, after he was
deported from the Soviet Union.
In 1974
Graham Greene,
Vladimir Nabokov, and
Saul Bellow were considered but rejected in
favor of a joint award for Swedish authors
Eyvind Johnson and
Harry Martinson, both Nobel judges
themselves, and unknown outside their home country. Bellow would
win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976; neither Greene nor
Nabokov was awarded the Prize.
Argentine writer
Jorge Luis Borges
was nominated for the Prize several times but, as Edwin Williamson,
Borges's biographer, states, the Academy did not award it to him,
most likely because of his support of certain Argentine and Chilean
right-wing military dictators, including
Pinochet, which, according to Tóibín's review of
Williamson's
Borges: A Life, had complex social and
personal contexts. Borges' failure to win the Nobel Prize for his
support of these right-wing dictators contrasts with the Committee
honoring writers who openly supported controversial left-wing
dictatorships, including
Joseph
Stalin, in the case of
Sartre and
Neruda.
Swedish children's author
Astrid
Lindgren has also been overlooked, with some critics
complaining that the Academy does not adequately recognize
children's literature.
The award to Italian performance artist
Dario
Fo in 1997 was initially considered "rather lightweight" by
some critics, as he was seen primarily as a performer and had
previously been censured by the
Roman Catholic Church.
Salman Rushdie and
Arthur Miller had been strongly favoured to
receive the Prize, but the Nobel organisers were later quoted as
saying that they would have been "too predictable, too
popular."
There was also criticism of the academy's refusal to express
support for
Salman Rushdie in 1989,
after
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a
fatwa calling for Rushdie to be killed, and two
members of the Academy resigned over its refusal to support
Rushdie.
The choice of the 2004 winner,
Elfriede
Jelinek, was protested by a member of the Swedish Academy,
Knut Ahnlund, who had not played an
active role in the Academy since 1996; Ahnlund resigned, alleging
that selecting Jelinek had caused "irreparable damage" to the
reputation of the award.

Orhan Pamuk
The selection of
Harold Pinter for the
Prize in 2005 was delayed for a couple of days, apparently due to
Ahnlund's resignation, and led to renewed speculations about there
being a "political element" in the Swedish Academy's awarding of
the Prize.
Although Pinter was unable to give his
controversial Nobel Lecture, "Art, Truth and Politics", in
person, due to his hospitalization for ill health, he delivered it
from a television studio on video to an audience projected on three
large screens at the Swedish Academy
, in Stockholm
, and it was simultaneously transmitted on Channel Four, in the UK
, on the
evening of 7 December 2005. The 46-minute television
transmission was introduced by friend and fellow playwright
David Hare. Subsequently, the
full text and streaming video formats were posted for the public on
the Nobel Prize and Swedish Academy official
Websites. In these formats Pinter's Nobel
Lecture has been widely watched, cited, quoted, and distributed by
print and online media and the source of much commentary and
debate. A privately-printed limited edition,
Art, Truth and
Politics: The Nobel Lecture, is published by
Faber and Faber (2006). The issue of their
"political stance" was also raised in response to the awards of the
Nobel Prize in Literature to
Orhan Pamuk
and
Doris Lessing in 2006 and 2007,
respectively.
The heavy focus on European authors, and authors from Sweden in
particular, has been the subject of mounting criticism, even from
major Swedish newspapers. The absolute majority of the laureates
have been European, with Sweden itself receiving more prizes than
all of Asia. In 2008,
Horace Engdahl,
then the permanent secretary of the Academy, declared that "Europe
still is the center of the literary world" and that "the US is too
isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really
participate in the big dialogue of literature.". In 2009, Engdahl's
replacement,
Peter Englund, rejected
this sentiment ("In most language areas ... there are authors that
really deserve and could get the Nobel Prize and that goes for the
United States and the Americas, as well,") and acknowledged the
Eurocentric nature of the award, saying that, "I think that is a
problem. We tend to relate more easily to literature written in
Europe and in the European tradition." The 2009 award to
Herta Mueller, previously little-known outside
Germany but many times named favorite for the Nobel prize, has
re-ignited criticism that the award committee is biased as
Eurocentric mostly by the US press.
List of Laureates
See also
Notes
- Marjorie Kehe, "Are US Writers Unworthy of the Nobel Prize?"
Christian Science
Monitor, Chapter & Verse Blog. Web. The Christian Science Monitor,
2 October 2008. Accessed 15 March 2009.
- Olivier Truc, "Et Camus obtint enfin le prix Nobel".
Le Monde, 28
December 2008.
- Harold Orlans, "Self-Centered Translating: Why W. H. Auden Misinterpreted
'Markings' When Translating It from Swedish to English",
Change: The Magazine of Higher
Learning (published by Heldref Publications for
The
Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching), 1 May
2000, Highbeam Encyclopedia, encyclopedia.com,
accessed 26 April 2008: "Swedish dismay at the mangled translation
may have cost Auden the Nobel prize in literature."
- Alex Hunnicutt, "Dag Hammarskjöld", glbtq: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual,
Transgender, and Queer Culture (Heldref
Publications, 2004), glbtq.com, accessed 11 August
2006: "Unless some hidden manuscript surfaces or an aging lover
suddenly feels moved to revelation, it seems unlikely the world
will ever know for sure the details of Hammarskjöld's sexual
experience. W. H.
Auden, who translated Markings, was convinced of his
[Hammarsköld's] homosexuality; it is thought that saying so
publicly during a lecture tour of Scandinavia may have cost Auden
the Nobel Prize for Literature that he was widely expected to
receive in the 1960s."
- Stig Fredrikson, "How I Helped Alexandr Solzhenitsyn Smuggle His
Nobel Lecture from the USSR", nobelprize.org, 22
February 2006, accessed 12 October 2006.
- New studies agree that Beauvoir is eclipsing Sartre
as a philosopher and writer The Independent May 25, 2008.
Retrieved on January 4, 2009.
- Textos escondidos de Pablo Neruda
Libros April 14, 2005. Retrieved on January 4, 2009.
- Julie Carroll, " 'Pope and Witch' Draws Catholic
Protests", The Catholic Spirit, 27 February 2007,
accessed 13 October 2007.
- "Nobel Stuns Italy's Left-wing Jester",
The Times,
10 October 1997, rpt. in Archives of a list at
hartford-hwp.com, accessed 17 October 2007.
- Associated Press, "Who
Deserves Nobel Prize? Judges Don't Agree", MSNBC, 11 October 2005, accessed 13
October 2007.
- Pinter's "Nobel Lecture: Art, Truth & Politics" is posted
online on the official website of the Nobel Prize, nobelprize.org, and
it is also available on DVD.
- Dan Kellum, "Lessing's Legacy of Political Literature: The
Nation: Skeptics Call It A Nonliterary Nobel Win, But Academy Saw
Her Visionary Power", CBS News, rpt. from The Nation (column), 14
October 2007, accessed 17 October 2007.
- Dagens Nyheter Akademien väljer helst en europé (The Academy
prefers to pick a European)
- The
Nobel Committee has no clue about American literature
- [1]
- Jordan, Mary. Author's Nobel Stirs
Shock-and-'Bah'. Washington Post. Friday, October 9,
2009.
External links