[NP] Nobel Prize for Literature
Nobel Prize for Literature [NP]
Awarded annually since 1901
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” That line from Shelley comes to mind when I think about the Nobel Prize for Literature. Not because the Nobel laureates rule supreme, but because in the context of the poem, a brief vision of a vast desert wasteland, this line is an arrogant boast etched in stone ruins that are all that remain of a once great kingdom. The braggadocio of Oxymandias didn’t stand up to the sweep of history. Likewise, Nobel laureates garner a lot of praise, but all too often they don’t live on in the canon. Of the 101 laureates to receive the Nobel since 1901, sixty didn’t get two votes for a specific work in my master list. (A work of literature has to appear on at least two of 24 different lists in order to make the Master.)
So much for the Nobel! Well, like most things, it is more complicated than that. Turns out that the master list is extremely preferential toward English language writers, specifically those from either America or the British Isles. The Nobel, throughout history, has fought against that bias. It awards English speakers begrudgingly. Less than a quarter of its recipients write in English. The Nobel, then, is a great way to broaden the spectrum of this list, adding lots of non-English speaking authors that are very worth reading. Right? The problem is that the Nobel doesn’t award works but rather it recognizes an author’s oeuvre. My solution at first was to give a vote to everything a laureate wrote and, if any work got a vote from another list, it was included in the master. But this would have made a very long list even longer. So no. I decided that if an author won the Nobel, he just got a mention beside his name and birthdate. [NP]. Kind of a gold star. Another problem arose. Some really great authors were left off through sheer bad luck. Specifically Jose Saramago, a man considered by Harold Bloom (bloviator though he is) to be one of the most gifted writers of recent decades. Saramago won the Nobel, and five of his works received a vote from various lists, but none got two. A flaw in the system. Great authors who write a lot of works – good works that get attention from other lists – but who are not writing in English, find it much harder to make the master list. My solution is to use the Nobel as a safety net. If an author wins the Nobel but he has no works that have received two votes, I select one to be included in the master list. Not perfect, but better. And better is a good thing.
Here are the laureates. Those with a work on the Master List appear in RED.
Mario Vargas Llosa
Herta Müller
Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio
Imre Kertész
Gao Xingjian
Dario Fo
Wislawa Szymborska
Wole Soyinka
Eugenio Montale
Eyvind Johnson, Harry Martinson
Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Nelly Sachs
Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov
Giorgos Seferis
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill
Gabriela Mistral
Johannes Vilhelm Jensen
Frans Eemil Sillanpää
Roger Martin du Gard
Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin
Erik Axel Karlfeldt
Henri Bergson
Grazia Deledda
Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont
Jacinto Benavente
Carl Friedrich Georg Spitteler
Karl Adolph Gjellerup, Henrik Pontoppidan
Carl Gustaf Verner von Heidenstam
Romain Rolland
Gerhart Johann Robert Hauptmann
Count Maurice (Mooris) Polidore Marie Bernhard Maeterlinck
Paul Johann Ludwig Heyse
Rudolf Christoph Eucken
Frédéric Mistral, José Echegaray y Eizaguirre
Christian Matthias Theodor Mommsen
Sully Prudhomme