A war of words
Nobel Prize Literature Haruki Murakami Svetlana Alexievich
Radhika Santhanam
Every year, excitement and controversy surrounds the Nobel Prize for Literature. Data show that being European and/or male gives writers an edge to win the coveted award.
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The Hindu
As an ardent fan of Japanese author Haruki Murakami (a Harukist, apparently), I am disappointed that he is winning the rather undesirable title of being the DiCaprio of the Nobel world: always in the forefront like a star, but never crossing the finish line.

Every year, Murakami starts trending on Twitter before the announcement of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Whether he was nominated or not, I will know only 50 years later, but Harukists aren’t known to be logical about these things; they just want him to win. And sadly every year he loses, with the other star, Philip Roth, giving him company. This is not astonishing though given that the Swedish Academy springs surprises on us every year. The Pope for Peace, you think. The Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet, the Academy announces. Murakami? Svetlana Alexievich. And so on.

Svetlana Alexievich. “Have you heard of her,” I asked my brother, a voracious reader who is familiar with even the most obscure names in literature, after she won the prize. “Heard, but not read,” he said. I was a little less ashamed; she is a journalist after all, and I am supposed to know of her but I really had never heard of her. I promptly ordered two of her books on Flipkart to keep up with the world.

Making wild predictions about possible winners and disapproving of or exclaiming at the committee’s choices is now a tradition. But what do the statistics show? Although it may be difficult to predict who the winners might be, it may not be too difficult to predict where they might come from. Venture some guesses. From Bangladesh or Guyana, perhaps? Not at all likely. The Nobel Committee has been criticised often for being Euro-centric and not without reason. A woman, you suppose? Again, less likely.

Alexievich became only the 14th woman to win the prize, an abysmal figure, really; even the literary giant Virginia Woolf was rejected.

The Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded 107 times to 112 laureates. Among the European nations, 15 have been from France, 10 from the U.K., 8 each from Sweden and Germany, 6 each from Italy and Spain, 4 each from Poland and Ireland, 3 each from Denmark, Norway and Russia, 2 each from Greece and Switzerland, 1 each from Belgium, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Portugal, Hungary, Austria, and Belarus. (One writer, Ivan Bunin, was born in Russia but has been declared “stateless, domicile in France” by the committee and hence not included). In short, 82 laureates or more than three-fourths of the winners are all from one continent.

Ten are from the United States. In Asia, 2 are from China, 2 from Japan and 1 from India. That’s a grand total of 5. India hasn't seen a Nobel Laureate in Literature in more than a century, since Tagore won it in 1913. In Africa, South Africa has seen 2 Laureates, and Nigeria, Mauritius and Egypt one each. Again, a grand total of 5. For a continent that is so large, this is a terrible under-representation. It is not as though there are no writers, of course; Chinua Achebe, for instance, one of the greatest writers that Africa has undoubtedly produced, was controversially not awarded the prize. Plenty has been written about why Achebe was ignored: Peter Jazzy Ezeh wrote in New African Magazine, for instance, “…Such people are not desperate to win praise because often they are usually at a distance others are yet to reach. You cannot praise what you do not understand. They give humanity the benefit of their ideas, not minding when the rest of society will see the sense in such ideas.”

“You cannot praise what you cannot understand.” This, perhaps, sums up a part of the problem as to why writers from regions outside of Europe are often snubbed. The number of awards given for books written in English is 30, but for, say, Arabic — one of the most widely-spoken languages in the world? One. Peter Englund, Permanent Secretary of the Academy, said, when asked if more writers of other languages will be awarded the Prize in the coming years: “It’s inevitable”. It is a hope.

The committee is not superhuman and cannot be expected to be an expert in all the languages and cultures of the world. But perhaps herein lies the problem of the Literature Prize itself. Alfred Nobel said in his will that the Prize must go “to the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction…” What is an ideal direction? Are there criteria to judge such idealism? And if yes, we’re back to the age-old debate: can books be judged strictly by ticking off boxes? How are books from all over the world chosen? For their style, grammar, political viewpoints, or social issues relevant to that time? Or a combination of these? Alexievich has won the Prize for her work on the implosion of the Soviet Union, but Tagore was awarded the Prize for “his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West.” One award for eloquent non-fiction prose on war and suffering; another for beautiful poetry: reasons that are poles apart.

To award any prize is hard, but to award the prize that the world awaits with bated breath every year is by no means an easy task. The Swedish Academy has 18 members, all Swedish writers or professors, to judge the best writer in the world. The 18 don’t choose the nominees; that unenviable task is given to “qualified nominators, invited through formal letters”. But just imagine the sheer number of books that will pile up on your desk if you’re part of this committee. For the 2015 prize, for instance, the Academy received 259 proposals, resulting in 198 nominated persons. This means that the ill-fated 18 have to choose one candidate among nearly 200 every year — 200 books with different themes, styles, languages, contexts and stories. In short, an attempt to compare every kind of writing under the sun.

Englund, when asked if there is disagreement between the committee members on who should win, said it would be “really strange” if the committee was always in full agreement. But wouldn’t a committee of 18 Swedes be more in agreement than, say, a committee comprising a South Korean, a Nigerian, a Brazilian, a Russian, an Indian, an American, a Bulgarian, and so on?

Given that this task is exhausting, there is no doubt then that politics plays some role in the selection process. The Nobel Prize has been entangled in numerous controversies, but the Literature Prize has especially suffered a large dose. W.H. Auden, for example, was nominated for the prize by author Dag Hammarskjöld, but a Swedish academy member was, according to an article in the Telegraph , said to be offended by what “he perceived as Auden’s critical references to Hammarskjöld’s messianic tendencies”. Auden didn’t receive the prize. Similarly, Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson, not very well known, controversially won the prize in 1974, beating Graham Greene and Vladimir Nabokov.

In 1997, Dario Fo, a performance artist, won at the expense of Salman Rushdie and Arthur Miller. Rushdie’s rejection made headlines, as two academy members resigned over the Academy’s refusal to support him after a fatwa was issued against him in 1989. Questions have been asked time and again as to why writers such as Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf have been ignored. The committee was also, until some time ago, accused of being anti-American: Mark Twain and Henry James are not Nobel Laureates, for example.

There is a world of literature out there, more than what anyone can read in 50 lifetimes. It is an understatement to say that this selection process is a complex, monumental task and it's really not surprising why it is thickly shrouded in controversy every now and then. A lot is at stake, of course. And every year, we learn of new names, new writings, untold stories, and add them to our bookshelves. But for young Harukists like me, I only wish the committee was more diverse. And will hopefully reveal to me 50 years from now why Murakami never won the prize and why there are such few women Nobel Laureates. We could do with more Alexievichs.