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Selma Lagerlf, the first female writer
to be awarded a Nobel Prize in
literature, faced major
controversies.
[35]
Illustration from
Svenska Dagbladet, 11 December
1909.
Some attribute W. H. Auden's not being awarded the Nobel Prize in
Literature to errors in his translation of 1961 Peace Prize laureate Dag
Hammarskjld's Vgmrken (Markings)
[41]
and to statements that
Auden made during a Scandinavian lecture tour suggesting that
Hammarskjld was, like Auden, homosexual.
[42]
In 1962, John Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for Literature. The
selection was heavily criticized, and described as "one of the
Academy's biggest mistakes" in one Swedish newspaper.
[43]
The
New York Times asked why the Nobel committee gave the award to
an author whose "limited talent is, in his best books, watered down by
tenth-rate philosophising", adding; "we think it interesting that the
laurel was not awarded to a writer ... whose significance, influence
and sheer body of work had already made a more profound
impression on the literature of our age".
[43]
Steinbeck himself, when
asked if he deserved the Nobel on the day of the announcement,
replied: "Frankly, no."
[43]
In 2012 (50 years later), the Nobel Prize
opened its archives and it was revealed that Steinbeck was a
"compromise choice" among a shortlist consisting of Steinbeck, British
authors Robert Graves and Lawrence Durrell, French dramatist Jean
Anouilh and Danish author Karen Blixen.
[43]
The declassified
documents showed that he was chosen as the best of a bad lot,
[43]
"There aren't any obvious candidates for the
Nobel prize and the prize committee is in an unenviable situation," wrote committee member Henry Olsson.
[43]
In 1964 Jean-Paul Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, but he declined it, stating that "It is not the
same thing if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre or if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre, Nobel Prize laureate. A writer must refuse to
allow himself to be transformed into an institution, even if it takes place in the most honorable form."
Soviet dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the 1970 prize laureate, did not attend the Nobel Prize
ceremony in Stockholm for fear that the U.S.S.R. would prevent his return afterwards (his works there were
circulated in samizdatclandestine form). After the Swedish government refused to honor Solzhenitsyn with a
public award ceremony and lecture at its Moscow embassy, Solzhenitsyn refused the award altogether,
commenting that the conditions set by the Swedes (who preferred a private ceremony) were "an insult to the
Nobel Prize itself." Solzhenitsyn did not accept the award, and prize money, until 10 December 1974, after he
was deported from the Soviet Union.
[44]
In 1974 Graham Greene, Vladimir Nabokov, and Saul Bellow were considered but rejected in favor of a joint
award for Swedish authors Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson, both Nobel judges themselves, and unknown
outside their home country. Bellow received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976; neither Greene nor Nabokov
was awarded it.
[45]
Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges was nominated for the Prize several times but, as Edwin Williamson,
Borges's biographer, states, the Academy did not award it to him, most likely because of his support of certain
Argentine and Chilean right-wing military dictators, including Pinochet, which, according to Tibn's review of
Williamson's Borges: A Life, had complex social and personal contexts.
[46]
Borges' failure to receive the Nobel
Prize for his support of these right-wing dictators contrasts with the Committee honoring writers who openly
supported controversial left-wing dictatorships, including Joseph Stalin, in the case of Sartre and Neruda,
[47][48]
and Fidel Castro, in the case of Garca Mrquez.
[49]
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French author Albert Camus
was the first African-born
writer to receive the award.
The award to Italian performance artist Dario Fo in 1997 was initially considered "rather lightweight"
[50]
by
some critics, as he was seen primarily as a performer and Catholic organizations saw the award to Dario Fo as
controversial as he had previously been censured by the Roman Catholic Church.
[51]
The Vatican newspaper
L'Osservatore Romano expressed surprise at Fo's selection for the prize commenting that "Giving the prize to
someone who is also the author of questionable works is beyond all imagination."
[52]
Salman Rushdie and
Arthur Miller had been strongly favoured to receive the Prize, but the Nobel organisers were later quoted as
saying that they would have been "too predictable, too popular."
[53]
Camilo Jos Cela willingly offered his services as an informer for Franco's regime and had moved voluntarily
from Madrid to Galicia during the Spanish Civil War in order to join the rebel forces there; an article by Miguel
Angel Villena, Between Fear and Impunity which compiled commentaries by Spanish novelists on the
noteworthy silence of the older generation of Spanish novelists on the Francoist pasts of public intellectuals,
appeared below a photograph of Cela during the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm in 1989.
[54]
The choice of the 2004 laureate, Elfriede Jelinek, was protested by a member of the Swedish Academy, Knut
Ahnlund, who had not played an active role in the Academy since 1996; Ahnlund resigned, alleging that
selecting Jelinek had caused "irreparable damage" to the reputation of the award.
[55][56]
The selection of Harold Pinter for the Prize in 2005 was delayed for a couple of days, apparently due to
Ahnlund's resignation, and led to renewed speculations about there being a "political element" in the Swedish
Academy's awarding of the Prize.
[5]
Although Pinter was unable to give his controversial Nobel Lecture in
person because of ill health, he delivered it from a television studio on video projected on screens to an audience
at the Swedish Academy, in Stockholm. His comments have been the source of much commentary and debate.
The issue of their "political stance" was also raised in response to the awards of the Nobel Prize in Literature to
Orhan Pamuk and Doris Lessing in 2006 and 2007, respectively.
[57]
Nationality-based criticism
The prize's focus on Europeans, and Swedes in particular, has been the
subject of criticism, even from Swedish newspapers.
[58]
The majority of
laureates have been European, with Sweden itself receiving more prizes than
all of Asia, as well as all of Latin America. In 2008, Horace Engdahl, then the
permanent secretary of the Academy, declared that "Europe still is the center
of the literary world" and that "the US is too isolated, too insular. They don't
translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of
literature."
[59]
In 2009, Engdahl's replacement, Peter Englund, rejected this
sentiment ("In most language areas ... there are authors that really deserve and
could get the Nobel Prize and that goes for the United States and the
Americas, as well") and acknowledged the Eurocentric nature of the award,
saying that, "I think that is a problem. We tend to relate more easily to
literature written in Europe and in the European tradition."
[60]
American critics
are known to object that those from their own country, like Philip Roth,
Thomas Pynchon and Cormac McCarthy, have been overlooked, as have
Latin Americans such as Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortzar and Carlos Fuentes, while in their place Europeans
lesser-known to that continent have triumphed. The 2009 award to Herta Mller, previously little-known
outside Germany but many times named favorite for the Nobel Prize, re-ignited the viewpoint that the Swedish
Academy was biased and Eurocentric.
[61]
However, the 2010 prize was awarded to Mario Vargas Llosa, a
native of Peru in South America. When the 2011 prize was awarded to the eminent Swedish poet Tomas