[In addition, here is LitHub's annual piece on what the odds are atm if you are interested. FT piece below if the link doesn't work for you]
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As the Swedish Academy chooses the winner of the book world’s most prestigious award, Simon Kuper looks back at an august ideal often marred by politics and bias
Alfred Nobel was a keen but mediocre writer. The Swedish dynamite tycoon wrote unpublished poems and a play featuring a 40-minute torture scene. To the dismay of relatives keen to inherit his fortune, his handwritten will of 1895 endowed five awards, including a prize for literature. Nobel instructed “the Academy in Stockholm” to give it to the writer of “the most outstanding work in an ideal [idealisk] direction”. The Swedish Academy spent decades puzzling over what “ideal” meant, before quietly dropping the criterion.
Next Thursday, a door will open in a gilded hall in Stockholm and the Academy’s formally dressed permanent secretary will step forward to announce, in Swedish and English, the winner of this year’s literature Nobel. A year ago it was Hungarian modernist László Krasznahorkai, for his “compelling and visionary oeuvre that in the midst of apocalyptic terror reaffirms the power of art”.
Now prediction markets favour Indian writer Amitav Ghosh, the Chinese avant-garde author Can Xue or the American novelist Thomas Pynchon to win the SKr12mn (£910,000) in prize money — though nobody really knows, as today’s Academy is less leaky than it was before a #MeToo scandal prompted a sweeping overhaul. And the pundits usually guess wrong.
The prize is ritually mocked. The Nigerian poet Chinweizu Ibekwe once marvelled at “the conceit that a gaggle of Swedes . . . should pronounce on intellectual excellence for the whole wide world”. British writer Tim Parks asks, unanswerably, how “Swedish professors” can compare an Indonesian poet with a Cameroonian novelist, both perhaps read in translation.
And yet, says Daniel Medin, professor of comparative literature at the American University of Paris: “The Nobel is the big one for international fiction. There is no comparison.” He itemises its three distinctive features: “It’s a prize for a body of work, by an international writer, that has more than a century of tradition behind it.” The Nobel shapes the global canon — even if the globe can push back. The award’s history also charts the evolution of literary taste.
There has always been a comic discrepancy between the weight of the prize and the parochialism of the judges. The Academy’s 18 life members — known as “The Eighteen” — are Swedish writers, literary historians, linguists and a jurist, some of them obscure even in Sweden. There were barely any female members until this century.
Michael Sohlman, a former longtime executive director of the Nobel Foundation, whose grandfather was instrumental in ensuring the prizes were created, notes the perennial risk of “Nobelitis” that leads some in the prize’s orbit who confuse its importance with their own.
Yet Sohlman argues that Stockholm is a good place from which to judge world literature. The city is small but outward-looking. Its upper classes traditionally read English, French and German, and don’t kid themselves that their national literature is world-beating. Even so, the Academy has awarded Sweden eight Nobels — more than each of Asia, Africa, or Latin America.
The very first award, in 1901, made international news. Somehow nobody nominated Leo Tolstoy, whereas 17 members of the Académie Française endorsed the French poet Sully Prudhomme, and he won. The prize in its early years was treated as a competition between nations like the Olympics, says Sohlman.
But he thinks that “productive scandals” have helped make the award great. The literature prize has never been as controversial as the frankly political Peace Prize; but because greatness in literature is more subjective than in the sciences, the Academy’s choice reliably angers critics. They delight in drawing up lists of overlooked greats — James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Constantine Cavafy, et cetera — though some of these achieved renown only after death.
The Academy’s permanent secretary when the prize began, Carl David af Wirsén, saw the job as crowning “the great men of continental [ie European] literature”. Women and non-Europeans couldn’t express universal truths. Admittedly, the Bengali Rabindranath Tagore won in 1913, but for his English translations of his Gitanjali prose poems.
WB Yeats, winner in 1923, wrote an account of his Nobel experience, “The Bounty of Sweden”, which captures the bewilderment that afflicts many laureates. When The Irish Times phones to say he has won, Yeats and his wife celebrate by cooking sausages. Heading to Stockholm for the ceremony with the Swedish king, Yeats sees faces staring in through the train window. He wonders what they are looking at, until someone explains they are looking at him. Fifty-five years later, the Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer strikes exactly the same tone: after a breakfast of eggs and bagels at his local drugstore on Miami Beach, he returns home to an unexpected phone call.
The prize soon acquired the prestige to certify entire “new” national literatures. The exotic beneficiary in 1930 was the US, when Sinclair Lewis became the first American laureate. The American winner of 1938, Pearl Buck, is remembered only as the prize’s chief dud. She faded into obscurity soon after writing her bestselling account of Chinese peasant life, The Good Earth. Buck was a first-time nominee, and that mis-step generated the unwritten rule that first-time nominees can’t win.
The Academy tries to make choices that will look good decades later. It often fails. Many laureates, such as the German Rudolf Eucken (1908) and Paul von Heyse (1910) have vanished, along with Buck. But Medin doesn’t blame the Academy. Almost all writers fade away, he says.
The Academician Kjell Espmark drew up an influential division of the award’s history into distinct periods. From 1946 through 1949, the Academy had a happy run of anointing literary pioneers: Hermann Hesse, André Gide, TS Eliot and the hitherto under-appreciated William Faulkner (who complained that the ceremony “was as long as a Mississippi funeral”).
One uncrowned pioneer was the American poet Ezra Pound. His applauding of the Holocaust on Italian Fascist radio had been “a ‘subhuman’ reaction”, said Academician and future UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld. Where to draw the political line was a tricky judgment: Luigi Pirandello, who supported Fascism, won in 1934.
The prize was at its most politicised during the cold war, when the Academy chose the unreliable Soviet writer Boris Pasternak (1958) and dissidents Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1970) and Joseph Brodsky (1987). Pasternak initially accepted the nobelevka, as the award is popularly known in Russia — but then, under pressure from the regime, rejected “this undeserved prize which has been presented to me”.
Jean-Paul Sartre, who refused the Nobel in 1964, noted among his reasons that the prize was “reserved for the writers of the West or the rebels of the East.” (Sartre also felt “tortured” by the “enormous sum” of prize money, “a very heavy burden”.)
Before the Academy crowned Solzhenitsyn, Sweden’s ambassador to Moscow warned that this “would lead to difficulties for our relations with the Soviet Union”. The Academy replied: “Yes, that could well be so, but we are agreed that Solzhenitsyn is the most deserving candidate.”
With the global decline of reading, the prize may never be so political again. Whereas Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago sold tens of millions of copies worldwide, today’s autocracies worry more about TikTok influencers.
From the late 1970s the Academy used the prize to draw attention to lesser-known talents such as Elias Canetti and Jaroslav Seifert. Medin says: “I know this from being on juries: there is always a pleasure if you can shape literary history.”
By the 1980s, the Academy — earlier than most of the western literary establishment — began looking beyond the west. This helped spur it into a more professional process. This starts with “qualified nominators” — members of literary institutions and academies, literature professors and previous laureates — who can propose winners. Some proposals consist of one word: “Sartre”, “Malraux”. Others are persuasive essays that push writers into contention. Certain writers such as Philip Roth (who never won) and Günter Grass (crowned in 1999) become semi-permanent candidates, considered year after year.
Since 2021, a group of designated outside experts writes annual reports on their fields of expertise. Nobody can nominate themselves, though there’s a tradition of writers lobbying for the prize by giving talks in Gothenburg or Stockholm and then flirting with Academy members over drinks.
A “Nobel Committee” of four or five academicians whittles down the nominations to a shortlist of five, which the Eighteen spend the summer reading. They decide in early October.
Yet now that they have to consider the entire world, where to start? Helpfully, many African and Asian candidates write in English, the language of 13 of the 31 laureates from 1991 (South Africa’s Nadine Gordimer) to 2021 (Abdulrazak Gurnah of Tanzania).
And some academicians are influenced by two proofs of quality: a record of winning other major prizes, and being amply translated. A “universal” writer is someone whose work transcends their own language, says Medin.
Translation has become central to the award. A new book, Literary Translation and the Nobel Prize, edited by Paul Tenngart and Karl Ågerup, argues that translators can help make laureates. The translators of German-Jewish poet Nelly Sachs (winner in 1966), Pablo Neruda (1971) and Mo Yan (2012) all sat in the Swedish Academy.
The Nobel has helped make the international canon more inclusive. After going global, the prize has recently become gender-equal. This followed a #MeToo scandal in 2017, when 18 women accused the French husband of Academician Katarina Frostenson of sexual assault and rape. He was later jailed. In a year of global scandals, this one was little noticed outside Sweden, but it remade the Academy. Several members quit — although the body’s rules forbid resignation — and the post-scandal “Eighteen” included many more women. They awarded the 2018 prize, a year late, to Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, and there have been three female laureates since 2018. In fact, notes Kaj Schueler, author of a Swedish book on the prize, there’s been a precise pattern: male and female victories alternate. If that continues, then after Krasznahorkai’s win in 2025, this year’s laureate would be a woman, perhaps it will be Xue’s year?
The winners’ reactions are part of the award’s lore. John Steinbeck in 1962, when asked whether he deserved the Nobel, replied, “Frankly, no”. (Many critics agreed.) Samuel Beckett (1969) was on holiday in Tunisia with his wife Suzanne when a telegram from his French publisher arrived: “In spite of everything, they have given you the Nobel Prize. I advise you to go into hiding.” Suzanne, when told the news, exclaimed, “Quelle catastrophe.” Beckett dubbed December 10, the annual date of the award ceremony, “Nobloodybeldamday”.
In 2007 Doris Lessing, clambering out of a taxi laden with groceries, was unpleasantly surprised to see reporters camped in her front garden. Told she had won, she exclaimed, “Oh, Christ.” Asked to elaborate, she said, “Well, it’s been going on now for thirty years. One can’t get more excited than one gets, you know.”
In 2014, Peter Handke said, “They should finally abolish the Nobel Prize,” and then won it, controversially given his support for Serbian nationalism, in 2019. Bob Dylan, winner in 2016, ignored the Academy’s phone calls and didn’t acknowledge the prize for over a fortnight.
Yet easy as it is to dismiss the prize, and its inevitable element of randomness, it matters. Dylan’s award was ridiculed but sparked a global debate on what constitutes literature. Gloriously, too, the prize is only concerned with a writer’s supposed quality, not their popularity: laureates Elfriede Jelinek (Austria, 2004) and Herta Müller (Germany and Romania, 2009) weren’t bestsellers even in their own countries.
The Nobelpreis-Effekt, as the Germans call it, can turbocharge sales. The month after short-story writer Alice Munro won in 2013, her sales jumped 4,424 per cent in her native Canada and 4,213 per cent (probably from a low base) in Italy. The beneficiaries are often small presses that are nowadays the most likely to publish literature in translation. In the English-language world, Fitzcarraldo in south-east London, with only six full-time employees, had four authors, Svetlana Alexievich, Tokarczuk, Annie Ernaux and Jon Fosse crowned from 2015 through 2023. If Ernaux’s books reach one kid in a faraway country who hadn’t heard of her before, the prize matters, says Medin.
And it matters more in a world where book reviews and reading itself are in decline. Only the Nobel announcement can get a poet’s name trending on social media. Next Thursday’s announcement, with all its attendant scorn and outrage, is an ancient ritual that may be good for literature.
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