Great, we don't have enough European laureates.
It's true. Although what you said above is a joke, we can notice a raw truth: unfortunatelly, European Literature is the pivot of World Literature yet.
I don't want to devirtuate this thread with I'll say below (of course we're talking about Booker Prize, not about Nobel Prize yet - in fact, we are close do do that) and I apologize in advance if the board thinks I'm devirtuating this thread.
About your quote, yes, we agree. I'm sorry if I sound eurocentric, but we ought to admite that, unfortunatelly, there are an ascedant (better, a boom) of Eastern European authors.
We have Drago Jančar, Andrey Kurkov, Yurii Andrukhovych, the late Dubravka Ugrešić, Péter Nádas, László Krasznahorkai, Jáchym Topol, Mikhail Shishkin, Victor Pelevin, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, Aleksandar Hemon, Saša Stanišíć, Hamid Ismailov, Slavenka Drakulić, Magdalena Tulli... All of them "Nobelist".
But, Daniel, please notice a simple thing: the citzens from Eastern Europe aren't considered as "European persons" and suffer racism and xenophoby.
Albanian, Bozniak, Serbian, Ukranian and Russian people aren't part of Europe for many people of "developed" Europe.
We have the case of many authors from Spain who write in minority languages such as Català, Gallego and Euskara, but if SA laureates someone who writes in these languages, international broadcastings will say: another European writer?
We could transport ourselves to Asia and Africa to find new laureates (in my humble opinion, I think African authors MUST be laureates for uninterrupted 20 years with the aim of historical repair), but many of them wrote in majority languages such as Portuguese, English and French: if SA laureates someone, there will be complaints against these languages.
I will be happy if SA look for Asia to, principally, India, Pakistan, Syria, Palestine, Vietnam, Phillipines, etc and North African countries such as Libia, Morrocco, Egypt, but many of them lives in Europe as political refugees.
As we are from Latin America, we can constate that there was a boom in the past. In nowadays, we have some authors who were on that boom such as Alejandro Jodorowsky (94 years old), Homero Aridjis (you don't like his works), César Aira (he was a top contender in the past, but he spoiled his works being a prolific author), Adélia Prado (nobody cares for her works in my country) and many others, but, in my humble opinion, they lost their relevances.
Actually, we have an upraising generation from Latin America, but many of these authors are very young and wrote little pieces. This generation is very good and anyone can be laureate soon.
