Sorry if you have got fed up by Nobel Prize talk by now but this is a question I just couldn't get out of my head.
A recurrent critique against the Swedish Academy is of course the long list of authors who should have got the Nobel Prize but never did. It seems to me that the critique is just as often very justified (Joyce, Woolf etc.) as not fair at all (Kafka…).
Interestingly the previois Permanent secretary Horace Engdahl once said that in retrospective about 75% (I’m not sure this was the exact figure but it was something like that) of the old laureates should not have been awarded and he also admitted that future readers and critics may well be just as hard to the contemporary Academy’s choices. Naming those eternal classics already today is clearly not an easy task (Even though a few early choices of the academy were clearly the result of incompetence, everyone including the contemporary members can agree on this)…
Anyway, in the last few years the age of the laureates have often been quite old and a guy like Harold Pinter was nearly missed (he passed away only three years after being rewarded). Neither Lessing nor Munro will probably be around for much longer either. This reminds me of another interview with the infamous Engdahl in which he mentioned a few names that he thinks would have deserved the prize but sadly had been missed. These were if I’m not incorrect Derrida, Kapuscinski and Sebald (I think that there was a fourth name there as well but I can’t remember who).
This brings me to the question: Which authors that has passed away more recently (Let’s say that lived at least twenty years back in time) do you think will be judged by future readers as great misses by the academy?
I myself have a soft spot for both Kapuscinski and Sebald. But I might also mention Inger Christensen (died in 2009), Marguerite Duras (1994), Chinua Achebe (earlier this year) and Gitta Sereny (2012).
What do you think? I’m eager to hear!
A recurrent critique against the Swedish Academy is of course the long list of authors who should have got the Nobel Prize but never did. It seems to me that the critique is just as often very justified (Joyce, Woolf etc.) as not fair at all (Kafka…).
Interestingly the previois Permanent secretary Horace Engdahl once said that in retrospective about 75% (I’m not sure this was the exact figure but it was something like that) of the old laureates should not have been awarded and he also admitted that future readers and critics may well be just as hard to the contemporary Academy’s choices. Naming those eternal classics already today is clearly not an easy task (Even though a few early choices of the academy were clearly the result of incompetence, everyone including the contemporary members can agree on this)…
Anyway, in the last few years the age of the laureates have often been quite old and a guy like Harold Pinter was nearly missed (he passed away only three years after being rewarded). Neither Lessing nor Munro will probably be around for much longer either. This reminds me of another interview with the infamous Engdahl in which he mentioned a few names that he thinks would have deserved the prize but sadly had been missed. These were if I’m not incorrect Derrida, Kapuscinski and Sebald (I think that there was a fourth name there as well but I can’t remember who).
This brings me to the question: Which authors that has passed away more recently (Let’s say that lived at least twenty years back in time) do you think will be judged by future readers as great misses by the academy?
I myself have a soft spot for both Kapuscinski and Sebald. But I might also mention Inger Christensen (died in 2009), Marguerite Duras (1994), Chinua Achebe (earlier this year) and Gitta Sereny (2012).
What do you think? I’m eager to hear!
