Ernest Hemingway, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jean-Paul Sartre were already well-known writers when they won the Nobel Prize in literature.
But since the first prize in 1901, the 18-member Swedish Academy has never been shy about awarding writers whose body of work was little-known or outright obscure to most readers.
As the fiercely private academy prepares to announce this year’s winner on Thursday, it must also get ready to face the traditional accusations of snobbery, political bias and even poor taste.
Robert McCrum, literary editor of British newspaper The Observer and a co-author of “The Story of English,” described the academy’s record of picking winners as “a mixed bag.”
“Some are unknown and some are very well known. Some are great, some are not so great,” he said.
This year’s winner will undoubtedly have his or her name catapulted onto the global stage, see out-of-print works returned to circulation and a sales boost. The winner will also receive a $1.4 million check, a gold medal and diploma, and an invitation to a lavish banquet in Stockholm on Dec. 10, the anniversary of the death of prize founder Alfred Nobel.
Critics say the academy’s choice is often as hard to grasp as its complex prize citations.
Linquistic zeal, or distasteful and unfit? In 2004, Austrian Elfriede Jelinek won the prize for what the academy said was her “musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society’s cliches and their subjugating power.”
Critics said her work, known for its frank descriptions of sexuality, pathos and conflict between men and women, was distasteful and unfit for a Nobel. A year later, Knut Ahnlund resigned from the academy, saying that awarding Jelinek had irreparably damaged the 220-year-old academy’s integrity.
The academy’s 18 members are appointed for life. Two of them, Kerstin Ekman and Lars Gyllensten, left in 1989 in protest against the academy’s failure to support Salman Rushdie after the fatwa, or religious edict, issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Two more joined the group this year, replacing two members who died in May.
Last year’s winner was British playwright Harold Pinter, a vociferous critic of U.S. foreign policy. That award, inevitably, triggered accusations that the academy was anti-American, left-leaning and politically motivated.
Horace Engdahl, the academy’s permanent secretary, would have none of it.
“Any idiot can say that Pinter was rewarded for his criticism of the USA, but how many can write a competent assessment about his efforts as a dramatist?” Engdahl said Tuesday in an e-mail to The Associated Press. “All talk of political motives in our rewards is nonsense.”
Winners too obscure?A political bias may be hard to prove but there is no doubt the academy favors lesser-known writers to international best sellers. Few outside literary circles had heard of China’s Gao Xingjian, Poland’s Wislawa Szymborska or Kenzaburo Oe of Japan.
Gert Fylking, a Swedish radio journalist taunted the academy for a decade by showing up at the award announcement and yelling “finally” when Engdahl read the winner’s name. After being barred from entering one year, he showed up the next in disguise.
“The point is that 99 percent of the time, the writer who wins the Nobel Prize is completely unknown to the big masses,” Fylking said.
Pelle Andersson, a literature critic for Sweden’s largest daily paper, Aftonbladet, said he does not agree that recent winners were too obscure.
“I think it’s more fun when they give it to a slightly odd, unknown author,” Andersson said. Jelinek, he said, was “a very brave choice.”
For many writers, the Nobel Prize was a brief moment in the spotlight. Others, such as William Faulkner saw their commercial and artistic cache multiply.
“There are writers whose award serves to validate the Nobel itself — (Thomas) Mann, (William Butler) Yeats, Faulkner, (Eugenio) Montale — the ones that seem so indisputably right,” said Michael Gorra, an English professor at Smith College in Northampton, Mass. “Then there are the poets, whose work may have been little read outside their native language. I suspect the award makes the most difference to them.”
There are five candidates on the academy’s short list, which were culled from a few hundred nominees sent to the Swedish Academy by invitation only. Except for the winner, the names remain secret for 50 years.
British-based bookmaker Ladbrokes gives its shortest odds this year to Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk and Syrian poet Ali Ahmad Said, known as Adonis; Polish journalist and writer Ryszard Kapuscinski; American novelist Joyce Carol Oates; and Korean poet Ko Un. Other perennial favorites include American Philip Roth and Peruvian-born Mario Vargas Llosa.