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The 2011 Nobel Prize for literature

beer good

Well-Known Member
Well, the Ladbrokes odds are in, and the winner will probably be announced in a couple of weeks, so we might as well put this thread up. Any guesses?

I got Llosa right last year, so I'm going to repost my two other favourites from last year and one more:

1. Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Kenya. Because he's one of the great African novelists, one of the few writing in an actual African language, and he's still active in both writing and debate. Read: Wizard of the Crow.
2. Antonio Tabucchi, Italy. Great writer, sadly underappreciated in the English-speaking world. Read: Pereira Declares.
3. Thomas Pynchon, USA. Because it would be fun if they, after all the butthurt from US journalists in recent years, chose the one US writer guaranteed to not accept it. Read: Against The Day.
 
Also, since I've been discussing this online for a few years now and the same questions keep coming up, I thought I'd collect them together in (reposted from last year):

The Nobel Prize for Literature: A Slightly Irreverent FAQ

(Oh, and there's a proper one here.)

What is it?

The Nobel Prize for Literature is one of 5 annual prizes awarded since 1901 according to the last will of industrialist Alfred Nobel (1833-1896), also known for inventing dynamite. (The others are Chemistry, Medicine, Physics and Peace; the Swedish National Bank invented an economics prize "in memory of Alfred Nobel" that isn't official but sort of piggybacks on the others.) The money (currently about 10 million SEK or US$1.5 million for each winner) comes from Nobel’s will. Yes, still. Nobody ever lost money by inventing good ways of destroying things.

It's not awarded for any one piece of literature but for an author's collected works.

For some reason, it’s considered one of the most important literary awards. This is not an official title in any way.

Who gets it?

Well, first you have to be nominated. Here’s a list of who is allowed to nominate; basically, lots of people from all over the world. About 350 writers are nominated each year, including great and well-known novelists, poets you’ve never heard of, a couple of non-fiction writers, and Bob Dylan. The list of nominations, and the decision-making process itself, is confidential for 50 years. The Academy has no obligation to take all nominations seriously, there is no official short list, and apart from the Academy members themselves, none of the people doing the nominations have any say whatsoever in who gets it. In other words, being nominated is a bit like buying a lottery ticket; you can't win without it, but you're probably not going to win with it either.

Last year, a truly completely unknown writer managed to get a lot of free publicity by having his former college professor nominate him for the Nobel Prize on the strength of some short story he'd self-published. He obviously never stood a chance, but of course most people don't know how the nomination works, so hopefully he sold a few extra copies of his book.

So who gets it?

The winner of the Literature prize is, in keeping with Nobel's will, chosen by the Swedish Academy, an organisation founded in 1786 to “further the purity, strength, and sublimity of the Swedish language,” which mostly means publishing dictionaries and critical studies of 19th century literature. In other words, the Nobel is a comparatively new hobby for them. The Swedish Academy has 18 members (on paper, see below), mostly writers and literature scholars, each of whom is elected for life by the other members.

Note that each of the Nobel prizes (literature, chemistry, medicine, physics and peace) is decided by a different organisation. Who gets the Literature prize doesn't (or at least shouldn’t) have anything to do with who gets the other ones, and vice versa.

Right, so stop waffling, who gets it?

"The person who has produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work of an idealistic tendency."

…What the hell does that mean?

See, that's the thing: nobody really knows. That's what Nobel wrote in his will, and it’s up to the Swedish Academy to decide what he meant. The interpretation has changed several times over the last 100+ years.

Fine, fine. Who’s won it?

These guys. (And occasional gal.)

Doesn’t it only go to authors nobody’s ever heard of?

It’s rarely awarded to the latest best-sellers, true, and the Academy has a well-earned reputation for not picking the most obvious choices. It’s not intended to reflect popular taste.

Though personally, I think the "nobody's ever heard of the Nobel winners" meme is pretty pathetic. I’d submit that if you’ve never heard of the likes of Steinbeck, Hemingway, Faulkner, Camus, Solzhenitsyn… or to take some of the more recent ones, Pamuk, Lessing, Pinter… are you sure you’re as interested in literature as you think you are, if these names are so completely unfamiliar to you? And if they really do pick someone you’ve never heard of, hey, now you’ve heard of him/her. You have gained knowledge. Is this a bad thing?

Also, I’ve never heard of the guy who won the Nobel Prize for medicine last year. Boo! Hiss! Elitists! Give it to the guy who plays House!

Why isn't Author X on the shortlist?

As previously mentioned, there is no official shortlist. Ladbroke's have no more idea than you or me who's actually being discussed.

Why didn’t/doesn’t Author X get it?

A lot of people claim to know exactly why certain authors get or don’t get the prize. Which is funny, considering the aforementioned confidentiality. Truth is, until 50 years have gone by, we usually have no way of knowing if they were even nominated.

Pick a reason:
  • There’s one award to give out each year, and on average, more than one deserving author. New books are published each year. Do the math.
  • The people who decide on it are a bunch of literary snobs. They’re not necessarily politically conservative (by US standards) or raging communist revolutionaries (by European standards). They’re just snobs, elected by other snobs for the specific task of being anal about language and literature.
  • See above re: changing interpretations of Nobel's will. Tolstoy was considered too radical, for instance.
  • Not everyone is a prophet in their own lifetime. See: Kafka, Franz; Proust, Marcel; and others.
  • People, on a whole, read an awful lot of crap and keep expecting the Academy to validate their reading habits. Not gonna happen (see above under snobs, literary).
  • The Academy has really boring taste sometimes. Fortunately, the older members are dying off.
  • People like to speculate, and they seem to think that the longer they speculate about an author, the better his/her chances of getting it. Whether the Academy gives a damn about how often a certain author has been mentioned by people who are not them is unknown but considered unlikely.
  • Authors die. The Nobel can’t be given out posthumously. Good thing, or they’d have to start with Homer and Gilgamesh.
  • Authors live. Not getting it one year doesn’t disqualify you from getting it next year or 20 years from now. See: Lessing, Doris.
And so some writers, for various reasons, end up without a Nobel prize. Funnily enough, we keep reading them despite their non-Nobel status. Putting it succinctly: if Tolstoy, Woolf, Joyce and Twain didn’t get it, there can be no shame in NOT getting a Nobel prize.

It only goes to Scandinavian authors.

Except for how not one Scandinavian author has won it since 1974. And only 14 before then. Which is still more than the total number of African and Asian (or for that matter, female) winners, true.

Why do they hate America?

So far, 11% of the winners have been from the US. Not too shabby for an international award. Feel free to compare it to the international spread of the Oscars.

But they said no American writer would ever get it!

They said no such thing. The former secretary of the Academy said that American literature as a whole was "insular" and "ignorant" regarding non-US literature, but that there is "powerful literature in all big cultures." (He's said similar things about literature in other countries too; see above re: snob, literary.) Stupid, perhaps, but that's what he said. A hundred angry US bloggers concluded the rest, then to prove him wrong, promptly responded to Le Clézio getting it with "Le who?"

Half the Academy quit in protest of Jelinek getting it!

One (1) member, Knut Ahnlund, quit. A year later. And he’d already quit the Academy ten years earlier and hadn’t taken part in its work since then (see above under life, elected for). At this point, it's a bit like George Lazenby announcing that he's leaving the James Bond franchise.

For the record, the other vacant seats are Kerstin Ekman's (she, and two others, left the Academy in 1989 after they failed to condemn the fatwa against Rushdie as much as she wanted) and Birgitta Trotzig's (who died recently), bringing the total number of active members in this year's Nobel discussion to 15.

Everybody knows that it's just political.

Do they now? Well, it's apparently supposed to go to authors who deal with idea(l)s. Those tend to touch upon political subjects. And again, Tolstoy didn't get it because he was considered too controversial and the Academy didn't want the award to be political – does that seem right to you?

Shouldn’t we have a say in this?

Not unless you’re willing to contest Nobel’s will in a court of law, no. It's private money, handed out by a non-government organisation. It's really none of our business what they do with it.

Why should we care, then?

I don’t know. Who said you should? If you don't, don't. After all, it's really just a book recommendation with a price tag on it.
 
Thank you for that fantastic break down of detail and information beer good. Really put a new spin on the whole thing, and informed me of a huge amount I didn't know!
 
And it's official: The prize will be announced this Thursday, 6 October, at 1300 CET. That's quick.

The gambling pros seem to favour poets this year - Adonis, Tranströmer, Ko Un. Well, it would be about time...
 
It seems a lot of people think Bob Dylan will get it, based on... well, a lot of people thinking Bob Dylan will get it.

Really, it's like something out of an Umberto Eco novel.
 
Beer good should add a review ( like a reminder ) about The Nobel Prize For Mathematics :whistling:
 
Just a couple to whet your appetite:

Allegro (Tomas Tranströmer - transl. Robin Fulton)

I play Haydn after a black day
and feel a simple warmth in my hands.

The keys are willing. Soft hammers strike.
The resonance green, lively, and calm.

The music says freedom exists
and someone doesn't pay the emperor tax.

I push down my hands in my Haydnpockets
and imitate a person looking on the world calmly.

I hoist the Haydnflag––it signifies:
"We don't give in. But want peace."

The music is a glass-house on the slope
where the stones fly, the stones roll.

And the stones roll right through
but each pane stays whole.

Alone (Tomas Tranströmer - transl. Robin Fulton)

 I

One evening in February I came near to dying here.
The car skidded sideways on the ice, out
on the wrong side of the road. The approaching cars –
their lights – closed in.

My name, my girls, my job
broke free and were left silently behind
further and further away. I was anonymous
like a boy in a playground surrounded by enemies.

The approaching traffic had huge lights.
They shone on me while I pulled at the wheel
in a transparent terror that floated like egg white.
The seconds grew – there was space in them –
they grew as big as hospital buildings.

You could almost pause
and breathe out for a while
before being crushed.

Then something caught: a helping grain of sand
or a wonderful gust of wind. The car broke free
and scuttled smartly right over the road.
A post shot up and cracked – a sharp clang – it
flew away in the darkness.

Then – stillness. I sat back in my seat-belt
and saw someone coming through the whirling snow
to see what had become of me.

    II

I have been walking for a long time
on the frozen Östergötland fields.
I have not seen a single person.

In other parts of the world
there are people who are born, live and die
in a perpetual crowd.

To be always visible – to live
in a swarm of eyes –
a special expression must develop.
Face coated with clay.

The murmuring rises and falls
while they divide up among themselves
the sky, the shadows, the sand grains.

I must be alone
ten minutes in the morning
and ten minutes in the evening.
– Without a programme.

Everyone is queuing at everyone's door.

Many.

One.

Storm (Tomas Tranströmer - transl. Robin Fulton)

Here the walker suddenly meets the giant
oak tree, like a petrified elk whose crown is
furlongs wide before the September ocean's
murky green fortress.

Northern storm. The season when rowanberry
clusters swell. Awake in the darkness, listen:
constellations stamping inside their stalls, high
over the treetops.
 
Beer Good, can you post up The Stones in the original Swedish? I'd be interested to see how Fulton has translated the poems...whether it's ideas, images rhythm, etc.
 
Fulton seems pretty good with both rhythm and images, from what I've seen so far.

Stenarna som vi kastat hör jag
falla, glasklara genom åren. I dalen
flyger ögonblickets förvirrade
handlingar skränande från
trädtopp till trädtopp, tystnar
i tunnare luft än nuets, glider
som svalor från bergstopp
till bergstopp tills de
nått de yttersta platåerna
utmed gränsen för varat. Där faller
alla våra gärningar
glasklara
mot ingen botten
utom oss själva.

The stones we threw I hear
fall, glass-clear through the years. In the valley
the confused actions of the moment
fly screeching from
treetop to treetop, become silent
in thinner air than the present's, glide
like swallows from hilltop
to hilltop until they've
reached the furthest plateaus
along the frontier of being. There all
our deeds fall
glass-clear
with nowhere to fall to
except ourselves.
 
Thanks for that. The shape's there and, from what I can gather, the vocabulary finds an equivalent.

I was just comparing Fulton's translation of Song with that of Hass, and I feel the former was better. Makes me happy I have the Fulton translations. Fulton's first line, with the word gulls separated from its sentence has a nice punch that takes me into the poem more than "gulls cried out". Turns out Hass made the translation knowing no Swedish.
 
First, definitely the most entertaining FAQ I've ever read on the Nobel for lit. Thanks for that. Do they really include bob Dylan in that short list?

I've been wondering exactly why not so many Asian writers were even considered. Is it due to the fact that there wasn't enough of a body of work to be held up as a comparable standard to previous winners? Or perhaps the culture too different, in that the things that's important and the issues and concerns being fought for isn't something that align neatly with what the academy would consider universally recognizable? Or simply the standard of writing just isn't up to par. Or most damningly, the most recognizable Asian writers are also commercially successful, which automatically rule them out.
 
Thanks!

Do they really include bob Dylan in that short list?
Well, again, there's a difference between being nominated (hundreds of writers each year) and being on the short list (about half a dozen). Both lists are confidential for 50 years, but since there are hundreds of people nominating writers, they occasionally do it publicly as well. The short list, on the other hand, is only known to the Academy. In other words: Yes, Dylan is nominated each year, we have no way of knowing if he's on the short list, but I'd be very surprised if he was.

I've been wondering exactly why not so many Asian writers were even considered.
Again, until 50 years have gone by, we don't know for sure who was considered or not. The current secretary of the Academy has said that they have a Eurocentric bias that they're trying to overcome, so... *shrug* Of course there's no rule as such against commercially successful writers getting it, and several have in the last few years, but personally I kind of like it when it goes to a writer who hasn't already made millions of dollars and fans.
 
Understood. Would have liked to see how many from South East Asia were even nominated.

Wouldn't they be able to address Eurocentric bias by, I dunno, induct a couple of Asians/Africans into the committee? I'd nominate you, actually, if you weren't already Swedish.
 
Wouldn't they be able to address Eurocentric bias by, I dunno, induct a couple of Asians/Africans into the committee? I'd nominate you, actually, if you weren't already Swedish.

It's not a committee, it's the Royal Swedish Academy; by definition, they tend to be Swedes. I don't know if there's an actual rule for that, but since they've been meeting in Stockholm on a weekly basis since 1786, I think it'd be a long commute. :)

I wouldn't mind being in it, tbh. They get pea soup every Thursday. Yum.
 
Both lists are confidential for 50 years, but since there are hundreds of people nominating writers, they occasionally do it publicly as well. The short list, on the other hand, is only known to the Academy.

Speaking of which, they just lifted the confidentiality on the 1961 deliberations. Ivo Andric got it, we already knew that, but apparently Graham Greene and Karen Blixen came very close - Greene would probably have got it if the Academy hadn't hated his 1960 novel A Burnt-Out Case.

JRR Tolkien was also nominated in 1961, and dismissed since The Lord Of The Rings was "not fiction of the highest order in any way whatsoever".
 
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