Nobel Prize Controversies - Literature

Literature

The Prize in Literature has a history of controversial awards and notorious snubs. More indisputably major authors have been ignored by the Nobel Committee than have been honored by it, including Marcel Proust, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, Jorge Luis Borges, Gertrude Stein, August Strindberg, John Updike, Arthur Miller, Bertolt Brecht, Yannis Ritsos, often for political or extra-literary reasons. Conversely, many writers whom subsequent criticism regarded as minor, inconsequential or transitional won the prize.

From 1901 to 1912, the committee's work reflected 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. Sweden's historic antipathy towards Russia was cited as the reason neither Tolstoy nor Anton Chekhov took the prize. During World War I and its immediate aftermath, the committee adopted a policy of neutrality, favoring writers from non-combatant countries.

The heavy focus on European authors, and Swedes in particular, is the subject of mounting criticism, including from major Swedish newspapers. The majority of the laureates have been European. Swedes received 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 bias of the selections, 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 prize awarded to Herta Müller was attacked because many US literary critics and professors had never heard of Müller before. This reignited criticism that the committee was too Eurocentric.

The 2005 prize went to Harold Pinter "who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms".. The award was delayed for some days, apparently due to Knut Ahnlund's resignation. In turn, this renewed speculation about a "political element" existing in the Swedish Academy's awarding of the Prize. Although poor health prevented him from giving his controversial Nobel Lecture, "Art, Truth and Politics", in person, he appeared on video, which was simultaneously transmitted on Britain's Channel Four. The issue of "political stance" was also raised in response to Orhan Pamuk and Doris Lessing, prizewinners in 2006 and 2007, respectively.

The 2004 prize was awarded to Elfriede Jelinek. Inactive since 1996 Academy member Knut Ahnlund resigned, alleging that selecting Jelinek had caused "irreparable damage" to the prize's reputation.

The 1997 prize went to Italian performance artist Dario Fo and 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 favored to receive the Prize, but a committee member was later quoted as saying that they would have been "too predictable, too popular."

The 1974 prize was denied to Graham Greene, Vladimir Nabokov, and Saul Bellow in favor of a joint award for Swedish authors Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson—both Nobel judges—and unknown outside their home country. Bellow won in 1976; neither Greene nor Nabokov took home the prize.

The 1970 prize was awarded to Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who did not attend the ceremony in Stockholm for fear that the Soviet Union would prevent his return. His works there were available only in samizdat-published, clandestine form. After the Swedish government refused to hold 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 later accepted the award on 10 December 1974, after the Soviet Union banished him.

Czech writer Karel Čapek's "War With the Newts" was considered too offensive to the German government, and he declined to suggest a non-controversial publication that could be cited in its stead ("Thank you for the good will, but I have already written my doctoral dissertation"). He never received a prize.

French novelist and intellectual André Malraux was considered for the Literature 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", while Camus won the prize in 1957.

W. H. Auden's missing prize was attributed 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.

Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges was nominated several times but never won. Edwin Williamson, Borges's biographer, stated that the author's support of Argentine and Chilean right-wing military dictators may have been a factor. Borges' failure to win the Nobel Prize contrasts with awards to writers who openly supported left-wing dictatorships, including Joseph Stalin, in the case of Jean Paul Sartre and Pablo Neruda.

The academy's refusal to express support for Salman Rushdie in 1989, after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwā on his life led two Academy members to resign.