Literary Nobel to confound critics again

“The Nobel committee has been very good at coming up with names that were not expected. They will surprise us again,” said Frederik Tygstrup, a literature professor in Copenhagen.

The political climate always colours speculation about who will win. The Iraq war has created a lobby for an Arab winner—Syrian poet Adonis, followed by poets Ko Un of South Korea and Thomas Transtromer of Sweden. Bookmaker Ladbrokes has also included US novelist Joyce Carol Oates and Czech Milan Kundera, are among the top eight.

For five years, journalists greeted the award announcement with a sarcastic cry of “At last!”—first uttered by Swedish journalist Gert Fylking in protest at hat he saw as the Nobel’s intellectual snobbery. “It’s the Oscar of literature, televised all over the world, but they pick the weirdest authors,” he said.

But, while even Austria was surprised when Elfriede Jelinek won last year, winners are often deemed obscure for being outside the mainstream of widely translated Anglophone authors.

The Academy motto— “Genius and Taste”—is resolutely highbrow but has crossed cultural divides since the prize began in 1901. Recent winners include writers in Chinese, Polish and Hungarian. Some, like poet Gao Xingjian, were not even widely read in their homelands. Others, like Colombia novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, already enjoyed huge popularity worldwide.

After Jelinek won, the conservative US Weekly Standard stormed that the “infamous snobs” of the Academy had again given the prize to “an unknown, undistinguished, leftist fanatic”.

There is a fair spattering of leftist laureates, but there are also conservative icons, like Rudyard Kipling, eulogist of the British Empire, and Winston Churchill. Going further right, Norway’s 1920 laureate, Knut Hamsun, was later convicted of collaborating with the Nazis in World War Two.

The most controversial choice were Swedes Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson in 1974: not for trumping Graham Greene, Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov, but because both were on the Nobel panel. —Reuters